True North: A Memoir

You should give a copy of this brilliant book to your gawky, silent little sister-it could shove her toward being brilliant too. It’s a love story of what Conway found when she left Australia in 1960 for Harvard: love for the ”incandescence of the mind” and the professor she met in its glow. This is also the rare memoir that acknowledges depression and prejudice without keening about being denied cookies in childhood. Conway’s self-discovery may make you question your own choices all over again, and both sexes can enjoy her feminism because her steely self-respect extends to anyone else who earns it. And she gives Generation X a new, outsider’s picture of the ’60s. A —Kate Wilson