In the lucid yet reflective manner that is Armstrongs trademark, The Spiral Staircase recalls her painful early life as a nun, her even more painful reentry into secular society, and most compellingly, the long-undiagnosed epilepsy that made her life a horror show of phantom visions and misplaced hours. We follow Armstrong to the Middle East and elsewhere as she searches for answers to questions no less daunting than the significance of faith. Yet what drives Armstrong is her distaste for and distrust of those who see only black or white, never shades of grey. "I disliked the crusading certainty of Ayatollah Khomeini, yet I was also disturbed by the shrill rhetoric of some of Rushdies champions", she writes in the wake of debate over Salman Rushdies Satanic Verses and the ensuing fatwa issued by the extremists on the Islamic right. Indeed, as religious dogma divides the world in ever new ways, Armstrongs learned views are especially resonant. But The Spiral Staircase, its name inspired by TS Eliots poem cycle Ash-Wednesday, is not a polemic, despite Armstrongs forceful and persuasive arguments for religious tolerance. Rather, its a beautiful letter sent by a gifted writer attempting to decode the meaning of her life. --Kim Hughes, Amazon.com