“An intimate portrait of the journey to forge an extraordinary identity, R. Barbara Gitenstein’s Experience is the Angled Road depicts how a girl born into one of a very few Jewish families in a tiny Alabama town grew up to have a life filled with path-breaking accomplishments. Gitenstein became the first woman and first Jewish president of The College of New Jersey. The book moves like memory, with incidents accruing more meaning and detail with each repetition. Organized by chapters that focus on the most important people in Gitenstein’s life, this memoir triggers the reader’s own recollections, thus doubling its impact. It holds nothing back: painful rejections by lovers, hurtful estrangements from parents, betrayals by mentors, life-altering surgeries. But it also credits those who broke with the era’s practices to encourage a woman and a Jew to resist traditional restraints and express all that was in her to realize.”