Steinem's book makes the case for travel not as a luxury but a transformative, potentially radical act, particularly for women, so long relegated to riding behind their husbands — or staying home.
Steinem has spent her career as a hybrid journalist-activist...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.
Ms. Steinem’s first book in more than 20 years, is a warmly companionable look back at nearly five decades as itinerant feminist organizer and standard-bearer...But anyone expecting a conventional memoir will come away disappointed. Instead of a linear account of her peripatetic life, she offers a sometimes disjointed series of chapters that focus less on herself than on the people, both ordinary and extraordinary, she has met along the way.
Given today’s campaign climate, in which Planned Parenthood is attacked and Donald Trump applauded, there is a striking lack of anger in the book, which is perhaps why it is also sometimes a bit boring. While the first half is full of vivid writing, particularly the opening chapter on her father, the second half lags some. By then, her points feel made...but the stories just keep coming.
Steinem spent her childhood crammed against her sister in the backseat of a car as her father tried to persuade roadside antique dealers to buy his wares. In My Life on the Road, her first book in more than 20 years, Steinem elegantly reflects on this nomadic upbringing and how it inspired her own travels.
The author is a gifted storyteller, and this candid account of her itinerant life is in the tradition of all those travel books by women that Texas book dealer and man of letters Larry McMurtry has collected for years. The difference is that besides the sights and sounds of other lands and cultures, Steinem’s thought-provoking, sometimes hilarious prose reflects her own feminist coming-of-age evolution and that of the women’s movement.
For a book that celebrates movement, journey, and an open highway, Life gets into a number of traffic jams. Many stories drift and land at rest stops where she lets political or cultural byroads lead her far from a relatable personal tale. Instead, there's a lecture, important to hear, but often that lecture loses sight of the narrative.
