June 4, 2023 | Rome, Italy

The Road from Coorain

By |2018-03-21T18:28:46+01:00March 1st, 2006|Recent Reviews|

By Jill Ker Conway

Vintage, 1990. 238 pages.

S

mith college feminists might be surprised to learn it was a man who turned around the life of their famed president, Jill Ker Conway. “Your duty’s to your talents,” a onetime lover told her. “Never forget it. No one else can develop your gifts.”

And so she would leave behind an entire world: an aging mother, and the ranch where she’d grown up on her beloved Australian outback, to pursue an uncertain academic career in the United States.

It is not the writing in this fine autobiography that grabs, but rather that it is a rare memoir with real meaning. Ker Conway chooses her words carefully in sharing anecdotes and insights that speak to all women with minds prone to searching beyond their own limits. Read it, think about it (without dwelling), then just be glad for having read it.

Kristine Crane is Associate Editor of The American and the author of the "L'Americana" column. She lives and writes in North Central Florida. She was formerly a Fulbright scholar and journalist in Rome, where she helped found "The American." She is originally from Iowa City.