Steinem (Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions) weaves an inspired personal narrative by sharing stories of the places she's seen and people who have galvanized her, which includes everyone from poet laureates to cab drivers; and how their influence transformed a young journalist with a palpable fear of public speaking to the face of the modern women's movement. The author doesn't shy away from her flaws and doubts, and her anecdotes-specifically those about her nomadic, cheerful, and kind-hearted father-are deeply moving. What's touching about this work is its hopefulness. Anger sparks activism, but optimism fuels it. (If you don't believe things can be better tomorrow, why would you fight today?) Steinem's confidence and faith-in people, ideas, and change-make this more than a collection of retold events; it tells how people can be encouraged in unexpected ways, in surprising places, with only one caveat: you have to be listening. VERDICT Poignant, accessible, essential. Activism is a people's movement, and this is a people's memoir. Ideal for readers who are familiar with Steinem's work as well as those who aren't. [See Prepub Alert, 5/4/15.]-Erin Entrada Kelly, Philadelphia © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

FOR MANY PUBLIC intellectuals these days, speaking engagements pay the bills. But listening, according to the feminist icon Gloria Steinem, is even more important. Her new book, "My Life on the Road," provides a lesson in how to stay relevant when your name is synonymous with a decades-old movement that has fallen in and out of popular favor: Keep moving. And keep asking questions. Steinem calls herself a "wandering organizer," and she explains how a life of travel has boosted her spirits, shaped her politics and made her a household name. From her earliest days speaking on college campuses with her collaborators Florynce Kennedy and Margaret Sloan, to her work as a journalist on assignment for New York magazine, to her role drawing crowds to campaign events - it's easy to understand how the political change Steinem has witnessed and fostered is directly proportional to how peripatetic her life has been. "I come by my road habits honestly," Steinem, whose father was an itinerant salesman, writes. She was raised in an era when women were still primarily associated with the hearth and home, but was drawn to a life of travel after two years touring India in her early 20s. Since then, she has spent more than half her life on the road. Steinem has gained wisdom from cabdrivers and fellow airplane passengers, and gotten story tips from strangers at rural diners and truck stops. The road signifies freedom in other ways, too. An outsider can often express things that local organizers or embattled professors or political staff members may not be able to say. Like a feminist Zelig, the 81-year-old Steinem seems to have been present at many of the most important political moments of the last five decades. She listened to Martin Luther King Jr. at the 1963 march on Washington, and a black woman standing next to her pointed out the dearth of black women organizers onstage with him. She stood in the White House speechwriter Ted Sorensen's office as John F. Kennedy bade him farewell, on his way to deliver a speech in Dallas in 1963. She's in California with Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez in 1968, in solidarity with the farmworkers' strike. She organizes the National Women's Conference in Houston in 1977. She's being cheered on a Pennsylvania campaign stage with the vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro in 1984. She's in Palm Beach, Fla., the day after the 2000 election, as voters demand a recount. "If you find yourself drawn to an event against all logic, go," she advises. As an author, Steinem is best known for her essay collections published in the 1980s and 1990s. Though they all contain first-person anecdotes, none are as autobiographically comprehensive as "My Life on the Road." Steinem's life has been so remarkable that her memoir would have been fascinating even without a central theme, but her decision to use travel as a thematic thread was a smart one. While the book is far from a tell-all, Steinem offers a few juicy details. She discusses her beef with the prickly second-wave feminist pioneer Betty Friedan. She describes sharing a cab with Saul Bellow and Gay Talese, who, according to Steinem, dismissed her as "a pretty girl who comes to New York and pretends to be a writer." And she is candid about her choice to support Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary. She made a pro-con list on a yellow legal pad, but in the end, it came down to personal connections: "If I were Obama, I would not feel personally betrayed by the lack of support from someone like me, a new ally. If I were Hillary Clinton, I might feel betrayed by a longtime supporter who left me for a new face." In her view, the contentious 2008 primary was falsely characterized by the media as a fight over race and gender. Steinem is as much a part of the media as she is a part of the movement, so this explanation rings a bit hollow - especially because Steinem wrote a controversial Op-Ed in The New York Times about the candidates in which she noted, "What worries me is that he is seen as unifying by his race while she is seen as divisive by her sex." Steinem, who has become used to being the target of right-wing protesters, was shocked when she drew the ire of her fellow feminists for creating a hierarchy of oppressions. That was not, she writes, her intention. But it was "definitely my fault." Steinem has spent her career as a hybrid journalist-activist, which means at one moment she's covering a campaign as a reporter, and the next she's onstage as a movement organizer. As she leaps from anecdote to anecdote, it can be hard to follow which role she is occupying at any given moment. The line must have been blurry for her, too, though she doesn't confess to feeling conflicted about it. Her writing style reflects this professional dualism. "My Life on the Road" includes the reported storytelling of a great magazine article, but several of its sections are organized in long bullet points, with pithy takeaways at the end that are ripe for quoting on Twitter or reblogging on Tumblr. By her own admission, she doesn't do much listening or talking online. She writes that abolitionists and suffragists "couldn't rely only on letters, newspapers and books to spread the word, just as we must not rely only on television, email, Skype and Twitter." Throughout the book, she calls for in-person politics and face-to-face organizing. She extols the virtues of conversation circles in arousing empathy and creating connections, but insists that such breakthroughs are simply not possible online. "The miraculous and impersonal Internet is not enough," she writes. YET SHE FAILS to acknowledge that the in-person connections she values most are not always accessible to us all. Sure, we can engage in conversations with people in our local communities. But Steinem's most memorable gatherings have drawn together farflung women, across racial and state lines, to share their personal experiences and find common ground. Most of us don't have the time or money to crisscross the globe in search of meaningful feminist dialogue. And so we do the next best thing: We talk to one another online. If politics are, as Steinem writes, part of daily life, the Internet is one place where those politics play out. It seems foolish to play down its potential. Although Steinem beautifully illustrates how her perpetual motion has shaped her professional life, there's almost no mention of how it has affected her personally. She tells a few stories that involve men she's dated, like a rich guy with whom she flew to Palm Springs, and a nonwhite lover from the late '60s, with whom she was verbally attacked by a carful of white teenagers. She was married from 2000 to 2003, when her husband, David Bale, died of cancer, but his name does not appear in her book. She does, however, devote several pages to her friendship with the Native American feminist activist Wilma Mankiller, and to Mankiller's death and legacy. One gets the impression that Steinem's lifelong ties with other women and activists - not her romantic entanglements - are the defining relationships of her life, though she never comes out and says so. In her afterword, Steinem reveals that in recent years, she "had to admit that I too was leading an out-of-balance life." She has become interested in nesting as much as traveling. This ending strikes an odd chord. She assures readers that we don't have to give up the journey in order to have a home, and vice versa. But she does little to explain how or why she finally sought to strike this balance herself, and how much it has to do with her getting older. Perhaps this is the subject of her next book. 'If you find yourself drawn to an event against all logic, go,' she advises. ANN FRIEDMAN writes a column about politics, culture and gender for New York magazine's website, and has contributed to Newsweek, The New Republic, Elle and other publications.

"If you want people to listen to you," iconic women's rights activist Steinem underscores in this powerfully personal yet universally appealing memoir, "you have to listen to them." And that's exactly what she's done for the past four decades, crisscrossing the country in search of inspiring women and women-and men-to inspire. Steinemn, a staunch advocate for reproductive rights and equal rights for women, long before either was fashionable in the public eye, writes candidly for the first time about her itinerant childhood spent with a father who itched to be constantly in motion and mother who gave up her own happiness for the sake of others. Vowing to distance herself from both her mother's dependent lifestyle and her father's peripatetic ways, Steinem ended up doing exactly what she never imagined: being a public speaker who's constantly on the move. Highlights include her role in the 1977 National Women's Conference-"It was my first glimpse of how little I knew-and how much I wanted to learn"-and her accounts of conversations with taxi drivers across the country. Throughout her travels, whether visiting small college campuses in the South or attending a 1971 Harvard Law School dinner where her equality speech was met with animosity, Steinem strives to create positive, meaningful change. Her inviting prose as easy and enjoyable to read, even when the subject matter veers towards the painful. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

A respected feminist activist's memoir about the life lessons she learned as a peripatetic political organizer. Until she was 10 years old, Steinem (Moving Beyond Words, 1993, etc.) grew up following two parents who could never seem to put down roots. Only after her stability-craving mother separated from her restlessly migratory father did she settlefor a brief time until collegeinto "the most conventional life" she would ever lead. After that, she began travels that would first take her to Europe and then later to India, where she began to awaken to the possibility that her father's lonely way of traveling "wasn't the only one." Journeying could be a shared experience that could lead to breakthroughs in consciousness of the kind Steinem underwent after observing Indian villagers coming together in "talking circles" to discuss community issues. Once she returned to the United States, she went to New York City, where she became an itinerant freelance journalist. After observing the absence of female voices at the 1963 March on Washington, Steinem began gathering together black and white women to begin the conversation that would soon become a larger national fight for women's rights. In the 1970s and beyond, Steinem went on the road to campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment and for female political candidates like 1984 vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro. Along the way, Steinem began work with Native American women activists who taught her about the interconnectedness of all living things and the importance of balance. From this, she learned to walk the middle path between a life on the road and one at home: for in the end, she writes, "[c]aring for a home is caring for one's self." Illuminating and inspiring, this book presents a distinguished woman's exhilarating vision of what it means to live with openness, honesty, and a willingness to grow beyond the apparent confinement of seemingly irreconcilable polarities. An invigoratingly candid memoir from a giant of women's rights. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.