On the day of her 1976 high school graduation in Lewiston, Idaho, after a disagreement with her father -- a logger by lifelong trade, and a fervent adherent of the Pentecostal Christian faith in which Kim had been raised -- she gathered her few belongings and struck out on her own. Alone for the first time, she sought to be her own woman -- without skills, without funds, with barely a shred of knowledge of the world outside the insulated confines of her family. She moved only a few blocks away, but she might as well have been alone on another planet.

It is a classic story of the search for knowledge -- of all sorts -- and the consequences, both dire and beautiful, of that search.