True North: A Memoir

Rating:
Summary: I REALLY LOVE THIS BOOK
Review: AND I FELT REALLY CONNECTED TO THE AUTHOR

I really can't explain my feelings in words. Look at the subject first then read on. They are all by Dr. Jill Ker Conway (shes a phd). The titles are The Road from Coorain (also a Exxon Mobil Masterpiece Theater movie as well), True North, and A Women's Education. Is she orginally from New South Wales, Australia. Came to the United States for graduate school, but stayed there after that, but was Canada as well for 6 years. Boys you will also love reading them as well. Thank you.

Rating:
Summary: True North
Review: For as beautiful and heartwarming as is The Road from Coorain, True North is a pure disappointment. A good writer can make any subject a delight, but Ms. Ker-Conway is not a writer, at least in this offering. Yes, she is in total demand of her language but in True North she does not write from the heart, she writes like a text-book author rather than as a story teller. Fine if that is her intent, but she, and her publisher, should not try to pass it off as an invigorating read. Further, her contradictory use of sexism is disturbing. On one hand she condemns the male dominated world of her era for their blatant discrimination of women, but on the other she unabashedly uses her gender as a basis for the hiring of colleages. As a highly educted historian it appears that history has taught her nothing. She is repeating and coninuing a clearly defined mistake of our society. I read Road From Coorain to learn more of my own mothers childhood, she is also Australian from the same generation as Ms. Ker-Conway. My mother was raised in poverty and had little oppurtunity for higher education. Yet despite the lack of a formal education, my mother is very well read and has a keen mind. Alert, inquisitive, always open to new thoughts and ideas. In comparison, I sense that Ms. Ker-Conway has closed her mind to much of the world, at least the uneducated world. If nothing else she comes across as an educated snob, an elitist. A common delemna to a genius mind. Road from Coorain is a delight. True North is a true bore.

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Summary: YOUNG WOMEN, READ THIS! Find out now ...
Review: I am grateful to Ms. Conway for baring the truth, as a service to those who need to hear it. I can see that her personal rantings have annoyed other readers, but my response was to the contrary. I have had similar experiences in the corporate world as a woman, and am grateful to find someone to back up my observations. Jill Conway proves that she will not back down to anyone who stands in the way of progress when she has a good idea, and those few who interpret it as antagonistic to their agendas, I suggest they re-examine said agendas, and not blame one of the few who actually succeeds in getting things done for the good, in spite of hopeless bureaucracy.

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Summary: Amazing how her academics influence the novel's turgidity!
Review: I loved "The Road from Coorain" and was disappointed in the sequel, "True North". Is it really the writer's fault, though? I think she honestly portrayed that she grew up, finally, to accept her adult self - childless, almost selfless in her devotion to history research, manic-depressive husband, and the politics of Canada's academic world. It is an accurate portrayal of the step-by-step determined advancement of a woman who went from childhood sheep farm to Sydney day school to University of Sydney, until she finally does graduate studies in Harvard, meets and marries an academic bachelor a good 20 years older, comes to accept her life devoted to university administration. My disappointment, I think, is in lack of a "happy end". All that struggle and internal strife, eternal problems with an aging mother, confusion over identity between US, Canada, England and Australia, and it seems to lead to a rather staid and verbose academic report writer. Maybe I am unduly harsh in this judgment, since there is no doubt that a reader would enjoy her old-fashioned, dense, and straight-forward narrative prose. Her systematic explanation of how she got so far in sexist-prone 1960's is very interesting for women and others unfairly treated in the work world. She was lucky in love, therefore lucky in life, that she met a man well-established, so that she could rise from eager graduate student to the wife of a highly respected professor, live in luxury and intellectual freedom in the beautiful cities of Italy and England, without going through the poverty and loneliness of most young academics. She acknowledges this luck in life but takes proper credit for her very hard efforts since youth to go as high as possible. Her organizational skills and tough determination carry her far, gaining wide respect for her fairness, so that she is promoted to President of Smith College in USA. Her husband duly follows.I will find all of her books and read them. She's an honest one.

Rating:
Summary: A thoughtful balance of the personal and the intellectual
Review: Jill Conway's True North did little to answer the question as to how a talented, ambitious, learned female copes with a manic-depressive husband. Actually, I was disappointed in finding out very little about John who must have been an incredible intellect, bon vivant, and wifely challenge. Jill may want to fulfill a need of many spouses dealing with a bipolar mate by writing a sequel.

Rating:
Summary: Compelling
Review: Jill Ker Conway is not only a master of narrative prose, but also her life serves as an example from which many individuals, not just women, can learn from and relate to. Her description of her graduate experience at Harvard sounds ideal, her description of academea's treatment of women past and present is relative, and her dedication to helping others through her administrative posts at both the University of Toronto and Smith College are invigorating. She personifies what academea is about - examining issue's in microscopic detail and helping to make the institution better.

This book is particulary relevant to women in academea for the aforementioned reasons, and for the fact that Conway describes how she helped change these situations at the University of Toronto by organizing her female colleagues to obtain more equitable pay in comparison to their male colleagues.

I would gladly recommend this book to anyone in higher education, either student or faculty, or anyone interested in persuing the study of history at the graduate level.

Rating:
Summary: A thoughtful balance of the personal and the intellectual
Review: Since I did not read the first volume of Conway's now-three-part memoir, I have nothing to compare this to. But I liked her light and tasteful touch with personal details. Conway wasn't dealt the easiest hand in life, but here readers will find no self pity. This is not a book for the empty-headed. But as a former history student and current college instructor, I can identify with much of what Conway writes about; I'm nowhere near as intellectual as she is, however. But this is a great book if you want to explore a woman's coming of intellectual age.

Rating:
Summary: An Embarrassment of Riches
Review: What I most loved about this book was the exploration of the life well-lived, particularly in the chapter "Nightingales, Gods, and Demons," a rare topic in contemporary literature in my estimation. The author's embrace of life's abundance, of all the things that make life rich (sustaining friendships, ideas, poetry, pleasures of the table, religion, etc.) seemed at once old-fashioned and like rain in the desert. She's not afraid to use the "m" word (moral) in that context, something for which I was heartily castigated as a graduate student in literature. How should we then live?

Ultimately she applies her considerable energies to academic bureaucracy, a subject I couldn't find more boring. And I missed the earlier, heady accounts of a newlywed academic whipping up Coquilles St. Jacques and pressing pates while continuing her research, floating through Europe on a sea of booze and liturgy while enjoying the company of cultural elites, colleagues and friends of her older Harvard professor husband. (A revelation to a woman of my generation, for whom seeing Europe probably involved a backpack and a boyfriend who thought pot brownies in Amsterdam the height of culture!)

At a certain point, I admit, jealousy began to inform my reading of the memoir, and I couldn't stifle a desire to gently mock the author's persona (whom I imagined saying, "Don't hate me because I'm beautiful.") Why? Perhaps because I'm a member of a most ironical generation, and though the author describes her life's tragedies, her (delightful) voice lacks a kind of ironical detachment; it's the voice of an ingenuous, breathless female grad student. Perhaps because I envy this woman the good choices she made that resulted in a rich intellectual environment, as I mourn my own disillusionment with academia and retreat into suburbia. The author describes the difficulties of keeping house for a controlling, neurotic mother while studying as an undergraduate; I'm not sure she sees the perverse blessing of her circumstances, nor do I think she'd understand the opposite sort of difficulties faced by today's undergraduates in terms of anomie.

I love this book for the author's continuing exploration of individual choice vs. determinism and for the fascinating application of historical methodology to post-colonial cultures in North America and Australia, especially regarding pragmatism in educating women and in a culture's life or death orientation. (I'm inspired to apply her thinking to child-rearing practices.) This book was so enjoyable that I'm puzzled by the disconnect I feel at the end, as I try to square this pioneering feminist's experiences with my own experiences of academic feminism as ridiculous and fraudulent. (For example, I was TA for a class in which the professor taught the "Victoria's Secret" catalogue as a "text.") I'm puzzled by my own relationship to feminism, of which I'd say something like, "Long live feminism; feminism is dead."