Where the Road Leads (Jean Calder, Hachette Livre Australia, $35 tpb, ISBN 9780733620379, September) ****

Jean Calder has lived and worked with people with disabilities for over 25 years. Not in Australia, but in the dangerous territories of Lebanon, Egypt and the Gaza Strip. Born near Mackay, Queensland in 1936, Jean was brought up in a strict but loving family. As a student she developed an interest in physical education, gaining tertiary qualifications and working with children with profound disabilities. In the early 1980s Jean travelled to Beirut, where
she worked with handicapped children for the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS), often in considerable danger. Moving to Cairo in 1983 Jean continued her work with the PRCS, and visited the Occupied Palestinian Territories, where she saw firsthand the difficult and dangerous living conditions. The development of facilities in the Gaza Strip
in the 1990s saw new challenges for Jean and the PRCS. Jean Calder writes with a self-effacing style which puts her patients’ interests at the fore: her concerns are for the people whose lives are deeply affected by the daily threats to their existence. As a strong supporter of Palestinian rights, she provides a detailed commentary on the political and military activity in parallel with her narrative of care.

Chris Harrington is a bookseller at Books in Print bookshop in Melbourne

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2007, Thorpe-Bowker