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Title: The Road from Coorain by Jill Ker Conway ISBN: 0-679-72436-2 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 11 August, 1990 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.76 (38 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: half decent
Comment: Jill Ker Conway was born in 1934 in Hillston, New South Wales, Australia. This memoir takes her from her birth up to her departure for graduate school in America; she would go on to become the first woman president of Smith College.
I very much liked the first section of the book, which describes her young girlhood on a 30,000 acre sheep station in the Australian outback. It has much of the elegiac yearning of books like How Green Was My Valley (1939)(Richard Llewellyn 1906-1983) and West With the Night (1941) (Beryl Markham 1902-1986). But as the book goes along it really takes on a sort of self pitying tone that I found a bit hard to take. In particular, she complains several times about how they weren't taught in school about how badly the aborigines were treated and the precipitating cause of her flight from Australia is an incident that she attributes to pure sexism. But in general, the story seems to be saying, "Look at all I achieved despite my hard scrabble upbringing out in the bush." Meanwhile, the girlhood she describes, while it does seem a little lonely and quite taxing physically, comes across as nearly idyllic and an ideal background for future self reliance and achievement. Add to that the relative wealth that her family eventually accumulates and the fortuitous appearance of scholarship money at opportune moments and I have trouble seeing what she has to complain about, other than a quarrelsome, but obviously lonely, mother.
She had me early, but lost me later--a half good book.
GRADE: C
Rating: 5
Summary: A book that will stay will me always.
Comment: "The Western plains of New South Wales are grasslands." Grasslands that with their vastness, their cycles of drought and bounty, and above all their isolation, shaped a little girl who would one day become Smith College's first woman president.
This book has been marketed as a coming of age story for girls. It's surely that, and a remarkable one. It is also (for this American reader, anyway) a fascinating look into a culture of many similarities - but with subtle, yet sometimes startling differences. Something else it ought to be is required reading for any young woman (particularly any gifted young woman!) trapped by a co-dependent relationship with her birth family. Read it, and think about what this world loses every time a woman capable of Jill Ker Conway's lifetime achievements subsumes her talents and sacrifices her dreams because the code of her childhood demands it.
A book that will stay will me always.
--Reviewed by Nina M. Osier, author of "Love, Jimmy: A Maine Veteran's Longest Battle"
Rating: 4
Summary: Mental claustrophobia of an era
Comment: I found this to be an uncomfortable read as I can totally empathise with the author, growing up in the same era and knowing the feeling of being out of sync with the older generation. I realise that this probably happens even now but at least these days, females have grown up knowing themselves to be the equal of males and without having to apologise for sometimes being smarter.Jill was fortunate to have a very good education but was also responsible for earning Australian government scholarships which are awarded solely on the good marks earned in exams( not by good luck as one reviewer implied).Even so, she was, not so subtley reminded that a woman's primary function was as a wife and mother and as a mere adjunct to her husband and even brothers. This state of affairs probably existed in all cultures at that time, and not just i Australia, but even as I read, that old feeling of suffocation was present...the feeling that you wanted more but of what, you couldn't say and your parents certainly didn't understand either.
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Title: True North : A Memoir by Jill Ker Conway ISBN: 0679744614 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 15 August, 1995 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: A Woman's Education by Jill Ker Conway ISBN: 0679421009 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 23 October, 2001 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
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Title: When Memory Speaks by Jill Ker Conway, Jill Ker Conway ISBN: 0679766456 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 22 February, 1999 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Written by Herself: Volume I : Autobiographies of American Women: An Anthology by Jill Ker Conway ISBN: 0679736336 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 17 November, 1992 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: Written by Herself: Volume 2 : Women's Memoirs From Britain, Africa, Asia and the United States by JILL KER CONWAY ISBN: 0679751092 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 17 September, 1996 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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