Home Inside the Globe
Embracing Our Human Family
Home Inside the Globe is a thoughtful and inviting travel memoir about moving across the world with curiosity and humility in search of self-understanding.
Empowerment Institute cofounder Gail Straub’s memoir Home Inside the Globe maps her love affair with the world, tracing how travel shaped her identity.
Straub’s travel stories span continents, cultures, and decades, representing an ongoing quest for personal meaning. As a child, she recognized her dual insider and outsider status: The daughter of a teacher at a prestigious school, she moved among Wilmington’s elite, but she felt the pull of difference because of her family’s economic status and faith. That tension sharpened her vision, preparing her for a life beyond borders.
Straub’s path to global citizenship began in Paraguay during a three-month summer exchange with the American Field Service. At the Sorbonne in 1969, she absorbed radical thought. She lost herself in labyrinthine Marrakech, joined a monthlong camel caravan across the Sahara led by Tuareg nomads, and trekked the Himalayas. In Russia, China, and Jordan, the work Straub and her husband did with local partners through the Empowerment Institute transformed communities, helping women to reclaim their agency and reshape their futures.
Through its inward gaze, the book unpacks personal revelations throughout. In the Himalayas, the land’s quiet majesty and her guides’ quiet wisdom made space for Straub to consider her father’s trauma, rooted in his own father’s suicide. In Ireland, a Celtic pilgrimage gave form to her shifting relationship with faith. Each destination became a balm: Straub’s grief settled, her memories exhaled, and her sense of home was redefined. Through these and other experiences, Straub learned how to give space for partnerships—intimate and professional—to evolve, and to embrace uncertainty so that organic solutions emerge.
What makes this work compelling is its deep respect for the beliefs, customs, and cultures of others. Despite its rare missteps—such as suggesting that women on retreat in Bali absorbed the local culture by donning traditional robes and attending a festival—the book retains its essential respect for other ways of being. And the prose is immersive, brimming with optimism when describing the hum of scent and sound in the Marrakech medina, explosions of color in Burkina Faso’s markets, the simplicity of West African village life, and time in the Himalayas and during vast, star-laden Saharan nights.
The book’s movement through time is fluid, detailing individual travel experiences and illuminating their impact on Straub’s future self to layer each experience with meaning and depth. This ongoing interrogation of what the trips meant to Straub’s development contributes to the book’s success. Its layout aids this unfolding sense of self across three life stages—youth, middle age, and beyond. Its chapters, dedicated to separate locales, leap through the travel adventures in order. Delicate hand-drawn illustrations open each chapter too.
Home Inside the Globe is a mindful travel memoir that reflects abiding respect for the world’s cultures.
Reviewed by
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