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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:

I stopped the wheelchair and took her face in both my hands. She had her usual vacant look. “Mom,” I said. “I’ve just published a book. It’s about literary criticism and I dedicated it to you.”

With unimaginable emotional strength from somewhere deep inside, my real mother pushed through the powerful downward pull of Alzheimer’s and in a voice, I thought I would never hear again, my mother said, “You could not have done anything that I would have appreciated more.”

Then the undertow overpowered her and she was gone again.

Before entering Academe, Gitenstein learned to lead from the periphery, benefitting from exceptional and surprising mentors.