Experience is the Angled Road
Memoir of an Academic
While Experience is the Angled Road: Memoir of an Academic is about leadership, it is not a handbook on how to be a leader. R. Barbara Gitenstein’s narrative captures the shock and the humor she faced when confronting the obstacles of being the only “whatever” in the room (woman, Jew, southerner, liberal).
Her parents moved from New York City to a small town in Alabama, where Gitenstein was born and raised. While Southern etiquette prevented most citizens from overtly anti-Semitic slurs, she knew from a young age that she just did not fit. When she left for boarding school in the 8the grade, she discovered that it was more than being Jewish and a Yankee that made her an oddity. She was an intellectual; she loved classical music. She survived painful loss and life changing challenges. In a chapter focused on her mother’s impact on her life, Gitenstein writes of the final months of her mother’s fight with Alzheimer’s
About the Author
Barbara Gitenstein is the author of some 30 academic articles on Jewish-American Literature and academic administration as well as the monograph Apocalyptic Messianism and Jewish-American Poetry. She has made over 100 presentations at literature and academic administrative conferences. She was often interviewed on radio and television stations in New Jersey, focusing on higher education issues. She did not grow up aspiring to be a president of a college, rather she wanted to be a prima donna at the Metropolitan Opera Company.
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