“I often watched the Southern Cross in the night sky, but it was not just a compass bearing I needed now, it was a judgment about what would be the moral path to choose.”

More than an account of her journey from a sheep-farm in Australia to graduate school at Harvard, this memoir explores the reasons for her decisions with frankness, even-handedness, and intellectual rigor.  Jill Ker Conway left her country “. . . because I didn’t fit in, never had, and wasn’t likely to. . . . I was a woman who wanted to do serious work and have it make a difference.  I wanted to think about Australia in a way that made everyone else uncomfortable” (236).  She doesn’t flinch, but I did many times while reading this extraordinary, illuminating book.

Jill Ker Conway, The Road from Coorain (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 151.