I just finished leading a burial service for a man I didn’t know and a family I’d likely never see again. The son of the deceased, a grandfather himself, scanned the nearby graves and pointed to an inscription for a 23-year-old woman who died in 1931. “My aunt passed before I was born. She had an illegal abortion,” he said as if our unfamiliarity gave him permission to unearth a family secret.
“I felt as if I had stumbled into a parallel universe, an alternate history of the Middle Ages that had been perfectly crafted for me: For most of my career, I have worked as a science writer, but my heart had first been captured by medieval sagas. The story of The Scientist Pope—one scholar called him ‘the Bill Gates of the end of the first millennium’—was a story I needed to tell.”
The world of Sarah Palin can be divided neatly into good and bad. The latter category includes Hollywood, John Kerry, Michael Moore, “left-wing professors and journalists,” Nancy Pelosi, the Ninth Circuit Court, liberals, MSNBC, the American Civil Liberties Union, the New York Times, Barack Obama, health care, and “all the lawyers and academics and schooled-up ‘experts’ in D.C.”