238 pages. In a memoir, Jill Ker Conway tells the story of her astonishing journey into adulthood. She was seven before she ever saw another girl child. At eight, she rode horses across Coorain, on her parents' 30,000 windswept, drought-haunted acres in the Australian outback, doing a "man's job" herding sheep because World War II had taken away the able-bodied men. She adored (her large-visioned father and her strong, radiant mother, who had gone willingly with him into a pioneering life of loneliness and bone-breaking toil. After her father dies Jill trys to be mother to her mother and resenting it, escaping into drink, pulling herself back, striking a balance. We see her slowly gaining strength, coming into her own emotionally and intellectually and beginning the joyous love affair that gave wings to her newfound self. Worlds away from Coorain, in America, Jill Conway became a historian and the first woman president of Smith College. Her story startles by its passion and evocative power, by its understanding of the ways in which a total, deep-rooted commitment to place—or to a dream—can at once liberate and imprison. It is a story of childhood as both Eden and anguish, and of growing up as a journey toward the difficult life of the free.