This is the autobiography of one of the most powerful women in the world of modern education. Her lifetime crossed the threshold of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Montessori schools and educational system are a well known alternative and supplement standardized teaching methods currently in use throughout the world. It has been found to be more enjoyable for many hands on oriented learners, and thereby more effective. The teaching method which will be explained throughout the autobiography has also been famed for helping many children learn despite learning disabilities, thus bringing into full functionality what might otherwise have been lost.

Maria Montessori provides a real life example of the challenges that women face as mothers when driven by a passionate sense of personal destiny that, awkwardly, is not motherhood itself. Through her women and men can discover more about what this woman's limitations and strengths really were. The importance of fatherhood should not be underrated. Even so, the pressure upon a woman to make mothering a top priority for many years continues to be more demanding of her time. There is apt to be some sense of poignancy associated with the fact that Maria Montessori was faced with a great challenge—being forced to make tough choices regarding motherhood because of what she had to offer the world.

The author spent decades as an intimate colleague of Maria Montessori's. E.M. Standing is assuredly the most qualified man or woman other than Maria herself to write about her life and her work. Within the book, not only does he provide an explanation for himself but he goes further, elucidating the whole of the Montessori system. For those readers interested in becoming fully trained in the Montessori method of education, the contents of this book are a valuable first step. The work is by no means extensive enough to serve as a full education in the subject but does give readers an excellent grounding in the discoveries of "the Child" and the means of nurturing the child with the learning process.