When Karen Armstrong left the Roman Catholic Convent where she was a nun in 1969, she entered a world vastly different from the one she abandoned 7 years earlier. She had no idea what was going on in Vietnam and had little idea who The Beatles were. Her memoir, The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness about her life in the convent and the spiritual quest that followed has just been published in paperback. Her other books include The Battle for God and A History of God.