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Empowerment Institute co-founder Straub offers a memoir of her journey to discover and refine her empowerment pedagogy via world travel and cultural study.

Straub’s story begins with her high school trip to Paraguay in the mid-1960s and ends in Morocco in 2018, moving chronologically, with each chapter devoted to a different region where the author spent time. Straub takes the reader with her as she visits the Sahara, on her walking pilgrimage in southern Ireland, to Burkina Faso and the Annapurna Circuit in the Himalayas in Nepal, and to Russia during the late 1980s and early ’90s. She writes in an immediate present tense, so readers exist beside her at every step; however, she sometimes breaks the illusion with the benefit of hindsight and acknowledgement of regrets and missteps from the perspective of an older self. Straub’s voice offers a rare balance of humility and self-assertion. In each chapter, she tells the reader about her teacher or teachers in that section’s geographical focus—whether they are an interpreter, a sherpa, or other guide—and she thinks back to past instructors as the book proceeds. In effect, the work is a lengthy origin story of her own teachings on empowerment and her role as executive director at the Empowerment Institute, which she founded with her husband, David Gershon, and it feels in accordance with these same principles, which celebrate connection and collaboration. In a chapter set in Jordan, for instance, she learns something about hospitality that feeds her teachings; in another, set in China, she reminds herself that the “best way to truly understand what’s going on in another culture is to travel to that country and listen as the people speak directly for themselves.” A great deal of travel writing tends to fetishize cultures, but Straub takes a balanced and nuanced approach with keen awareness of colonialism and other global issues. Lytle’s occasional grayscale drawings include simplified maps and cultural touchstones.

A pleasurable remembrance that revels in the author’s complex wonder at the world.