Volume 56, Number 1 · January 15, 2009
The Poet and the Wreck
By Mark Ford
Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life
by Paul Mariani
Viking, 496 pp., $34.95
Exiles
by Ron Hansen.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 227 pp., $23.00
The single-screw steamer the SS Deutschland, of the North German Lloyd line, set sail for New York from the Ger- man port of Bremerhaven on the morning of Sunday, December 5, 1875. Among the 113 passengers who had boarded the night before were five nuns from the convent of the Sisters of Saint Francis, Daughters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, in Salzkotten; they were bound for the Saint Boniface Hospital in Carondelet, a town in Missouri south of St. Louis, where nineteen sisters of their order were already working as nurses. The decision of their mother superior to dispatch them westward was part of German Catholics' response to Chancellor Bismarck's increasingly virulent Kulturkampf against them. The so-called Falk Laws, named after Bismarck's minister of ecclesiastical affairs, Adalbert Falk, had decreed earlier that year that only religious orders committed almost exclusively to education and care of the sick might be allowed to continue on German soil.
Review, 4362 words
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