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Educated by Tara Westover review – escape from a Mormon fundamentalist family

W e hear a lot about the edges of the US these days. Geographically, these places might be in the middle of the continent, but they are on the periphery of the country’s economic life, and often the social one too. The people who live there are desperate and pitiable, we are told, just as much as they are brutal and superstitious.

Tara Westover’s memoir is about being from just such a place and people. She was born to Mormon fundamentalist parents in Idaho, the youngest of seven. Her father Gene was the prophet of their small family, convinced the world was going to end at the stroke of the millennium. (When it did not, the author observes, the “disappointment in his features was so childlike, for a moment I wondered how God could deny him this”.) He does not believe in sending his children to school, but does believe that dairy products are sinful, owing to a message from God. “Isaiah doesn’t say which is evil, butter or honey,” is how he delivers the good news. “But if you ask, the Lord will tell you!”

Faye, Westover’s mother, largely defers to her husband, in spite of what evidently were some doubts about the divinity of his testimony. She finds some independence in her roles as a kind of faith healer and as an experienced but apparently unlicensed midwife. Eventually, she takes up essential oils, something called muscle testing, and “energy work”. That all these activities appear somewhat contrary to Mormon religious doctrine is something Westover never explicitly addresses. In the same manner that her child self once did, she seems to accept her mother’s explanations. Muscle testing, for example, is an “act of faith in which God spoke through her fingers”.

In this account – Westover’s family dispute her version of events – life is grim in all the ways one might expect. Money is a constant struggle; Gene works largely in scrap metal but it isn’t enough. Cars driven by exhausted family members crash during long drives, but hospitals and western medicine are forbidden so injuries persist and fester. An amazing number of freak accidents befall the male Westovers: leg shreddings, burnings. The author herself is repeatedly beaten and abused by an elder brother who charges into her room while she’s sleeping and fastens his hands around her throat, calling her a whore because of her friendship with a local boy.

And she gradually makes her way out of all of it. She has no formal education but manages to study her way to college. She struggles initially but gets good enough marks to do a PhD at Cambridge. And in the course of all that, Westover writes, she found herself – through what some might call a “transformation” and others a “betrayal”. As she puts it in the last line of the book: “I call it an education.”

If this were the 1990s, a snarky columnist might have already slapped a genre label on this book from the summary alone, deriding it as an example of “misery lit”. These chronicles of tough beginnings were enormously popular; Frank McCourt ’s Angela’s Ashes and Augusten Burroughs’s Running With Scissors topped bestseller charts. Critics are apt to castigate the sentimentalism that often thuds through these books – people in them are villains and heroes, the messiness of real life condensed into easier answers about who was right or wrong. And when James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces turned out to be largely bunk, critics everywhere secretly rejoiced. They knew it, they said. They knew these books were dishonest melodramas.

Westover’s narrative style – episodic, meditative and repetitive – doesn’t embrace melodrama to the extent that many of those books did. Her voice is slightly flimsy, scaffolding with sheets of plastic floating off, as if still in the process of building itself. Other than as a sort of articulate vortex of suffering, one hasn’t much of a sense of her. Educated relies on the conceit that Westover was saved by books, but at the end I had a sense of our narrator still hiding behind her degrees and certificates, not quite ready to step into the light. I kept thinking of Mary Karr ’s The Liars’ Club , a memoir of her hardscrabble Texas upbringing, and how Karr’s voice was one you couldn’t ignore.

Like Karr, Westover has a story to tell that shouldn’t be ignored. Her background says something important about the US: that even in a place of great opportunity, you can grow up without any idea of how to touch its white-hot centre. This memoir tracks all the ways that traditional American life puts up roadblocks and actively dissuades you from outgrowing your “roots”. There are insights here that could compete with JD Vance’s problematic and more ideological Hillbilly Elegy – if only they were more directly articulated.

Educated is published by Hutchinson. To order a copy for £12.74 (RRP £14.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

Tara Westover gained a PhD from Cambridge University

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Winner of the 2018 BookBrowse Nonfiction Award An unforgettable memoir about a young girl who, kept out of school, leaves her survivalist family and goes on to earn a PhD from Cambridge University.

Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her "head-for-the-hills" bag. In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged metal in her father's junkyard. Her father distrusted the medical establishment, so Tara never saw a doctor or nurse. Gashes and concussions, even burns from explosions, were all treated at home with herbalism. The family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education, and no one to intervene when an older brother became violent. When another brother got himself into college and came back with news of the world beyond the mountain, Tara decided to try a new kind of life. She taught herself enough mathematics, grammar, and science to take the ACT and was admitted to Brigham Young University. There, she studied psychology, politics, philosophy, and history, learning for the first time about pivotal world events like the Holocaust and the Civil Rights Movement. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge University. Only then would she wonder if she'd traveled too far, if there was still a way home. Educated is an account of the struggle for self-invention. It is a tale of fierce family loyalty, and of the grief that comes from severing ties with those closest to you. With the acute insight that distinguishes all great writers, Westover has crafted a universal coming-of-age story that gets to the heart of what an education is and what it offers: the perspective to see one's life through new eyes, and the will to change it.

Chapter 1 Choose the Good

My strongest memory is not a memory. It's something I imagined, then came to remember as if it had happened. The memory was formed when I was five, just before I turned six, from a story my father told in such detail that I and my brothers and sister had each conjured our own cinematic version, with gunfire and shouts. Mine had crickets. That's the sound I hear as my family huddles in the kitchen, lights off, hiding from the Feds who've surrounded the house. A woman reaches for a glass of water and her silhouette is lighted by the moon. A shot echoes like the lash of a whip and she falls. In my memory it's always Mother who falls, and she has a baby in her arms. The baby doesn't make sense - I'm the youngest of my mother's seven children - but like I said, none of this happened. A year after my father told us that story, we gathered one evening to hear him read aloud from Isaiah, a prophecy about Immanuel. He sat on our ...

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

Many of Tara's father's choices have an obvious impact on Tara's life, but how did her mother's choices influence her? How did that change over time?
Tara's brother Tyler tells her to take the ACT. What motivates Tara to follow his advice?
Charles was Tara's first window into the outside world. Under his influence, Tara begins to dress differently and takes medicine for the first time. Discuss Tara's conflicting admiration for both Charles and her father.
Tara has titled her book Educated and much of her education takes place in classrooms, lectures, or other university environments. But not all. What other important moments of "education" were there? What friends, acquaintances, or experiences had ...
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Westover's incredible story is about testing the limits of perseverance and sanity. Her father may have been a survivalist, but her psychic survival is the most impressive outcome here. Although this memoir represents Westover's own perspective, she strives to be rational and charitable by questioning her own memory and interpretation of events, often looking for outside confirmation from other family members who witnessed the same events. This is one of the most powerful and well-written memoirs I've ever read... continued

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Beyond the Book

Educated author Tara Westover's Idaho family runs Butterfly Express , a successful business selling essential oils and other herbal remedies. Her mother, LaRee Westover, trains herbalists and is the author of a book on herbalism, Butterfly Miracles with Essential Oils . Throughout her childhood, Westover was treated with foraged herbs instead of pharmaceuticals. "For as long as I could remember, whenever I was in pain, whether from a cut or a toothache, Mother would make a tincture of lobelia and skullcap," she writes. "It had never lessened the pain, not one degree. Because of this, I had come to respect pain, even revere it, as necessary and untouchable." It wasn't until she was in college that she tried painkiller pills for the first time....

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“Educated,” by Tara Westover

By Alexandra Schwartz

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I am far from the first critic to recommend Tara Westover’s astounding memoir, “ Educated ,” but if its comet tail of glowing reviews has not yet convinced you, let me see what I can do. Westover was born sometime in September, 1986—no birth certificate was issued—on a remote mountain in Idaho, the seventh child of Mormon survivalist parents who subscribed to a paranoid patchwork of beliefs well outside the mandates of their religion. The government was always about to invade; the End of Days was always at hand. Westover’s mother worked as a midwife and an herbal healer. Her father, who claimed prophetic powers, owned a scrap yard, where his children labored without the benefit of protective equipment. (Westover recounts accidents so hideous, and so frequent, that it’s a wonder she lived to tell her tale at all.) Mainstream medicine was mistrusted, as were schools, which meant that Westover’s determination to leave home and get a formal education—the choice that drives her book, and changed her life—amounted to a rebellion against her parents’ world.

This story, remarkable as it is, might be merely another entry in the subgenre of extreme American life, were it not for the uncommon perceptiveness of the person telling it. Westover examines her childhood with unsparing clarity, and, more startlingly, with curiosity and love, even for those who have seriously failed or wronged her. In part, this is a book about being a stranger in a strange land; Westover, adrift at university, can’t help but miss her mountain home. But her deeper subject is memory. Westover is careful to note the discrepancies between her own recollections and those of her relatives. (The ones who still speak to her, anyway. Her parents cut her off long ago.) “Part of me will always believe that my father’s words ought to be my own,” she writes. If her book is an act of defiance, a way to set the record of her own life straight, it’s also an attempt to understand, even to respect, those whom she had to break away from in order to get free.

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Amitava Kumar and the Novel of the Translated Man

By James Wood

How Lucy Sante Became the Person She Feared

By Emily Witt

By Sophie Elmhirst

By Leslie Jamison

In 'Educated,' the inspiring story of an isolated young woman determined to learn

Tara Westover is living proof that some people are flat-out, boots-always-laced-up indomitable. Her new book, Educated (Random House, 334 pp., ★★★★ out of four), is a heartbreaking, heartwarming, best-in-years memoir about striding beyond the limitations of birth and environment into a better life.

At age 16, Westover, who had never attended school, who could only watch longingly as the school bus passed by on the highway every day, made a decision: She studied to pass college admission tests and got herself into Brigham Young University. She didn’t have the sense or sophistication to know exactly what she was aiming for. She simply had the tiny nugget of an idea that other kids, normal kids, went to school and learned things, and that was probably a good thing.

Her childhood had been hard and odd. She and her six siblings grew up in rural Idaho in a filthy, ramshackle house nestled against a mountain she loved and a chaotic junkyard she didn’t. No television, radio or even telephone for many years. No doctor visits, no matter what.

Her father was a domineering man who responded to conflict or challenge with long lectures about God and obsessed about armed Feds showing up at the door. The kids had “head-for-the hills” bags they could grab if they had to abandon their home and survive in the woods. He insisted on home births, and though some of the children attended school for a time, he eventually ruled all public schooling off-limits. He ordered that guns, provisions and water be buried on the property so that when the apocalypse came — “when everyone (would be) drinking from puddles and living in darkness” — his family would survive.

The author’s mother, an herbalist and midwife, was worn out and worn down by marriage. She rarely challenged her husband, abiding by his decrees and tending to family injuries — including her own horrific brain injury from a car wreck (from which she never fully recovered) — at home, with needles, thread, herbs and bed rest.

Westover learned to drive a forklift when she was too young to drive a car, endured various kinds of physical and emotional abuse by a brother, and was instructed in the “art of shutting up,” as her mother called it. That required keeping utterly silent when possible and speaking little when it wasn’t to protect the family and the circumstances of their lives.

For all that she endured, hers did not approach the horrifically isolated and abusive lives of the 13 children in the Turpin family in California who made recent headlines. Westover is careful to present the good parts with the bad: She had loving relationships with her grandparents and a few friends outside the family; her father was at times tender; she was permitted to participate in local theater; and she worked in town sometimes.

And even when presenting the rough parts, Westover, now 31, doesn’t wail. She writes about it as she processed it when she was growing up insulated: in a straightforward manner. It wasn’t until she reached her teen years that she began to realize not everyone lived this way.

So she went off to BYU at 17 with 12 jars of home-canned peaches and a garbage bag full of clothes (all the wrong kinds). She made few friends, had to cover enormous ground to make up for her cultural and book-learning ignorance, and yet, eventually she received a doctoral degree from Cambridge.

It’s incredible, yes. But once you sift through her life, not so very surprising.

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New York Times Bestseller

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by Tara Westover ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 20, 2018

An astonishing account of deprivation, confusion, survival, and success.

A recent Cambridge University doctorate debuts with a wrenching account of her childhood and youth in a strict Mormon family in a remote region of Idaho.

It’s difficult to imagine a young woman who, in her teens, hadn’t heard of the World Trade Center, the Holocaust, and virtually everything having to do with arts and popular culture. But so it was, as Westover chronicles here in fairly chronological fashion. In some ways, the author’s father was a classic anti-government paranoiac—when Y2K failed to bring the end of the world, as he’d predicted, he was briefly humbled. Her mother, though supportive at times, remained true to her beliefs about the subordinate roles of women. One brother was horrendously abusive to the author and a sister, but the parents didn’t do much about it. Westover didn’t go to public school and never received professional medical care or vaccinations. She worked in a junkyard with her father, whose fortunes rose and fell and rose again when his wife struck it rich selling homeopathic remedies. She remained profoundly ignorant about most things, but she liked to read. A brother went to Brigham Young University, and the author eventually did, too. Then, with the encouragement of professors, she ended up at Cambridge and Harvard, where she excelled—though she includes a stark account of her near breakdown while working on her doctoral dissertation. We learn about a third of the way through the book that she kept journals, but she is a bit vague about a few things. How, for example, did her family pay for the professional medical treatment of severe injuries that several of them experienced? And—with some justification—she is quick to praise herself and to quote the praise of others.

Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-399-59050-4

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017

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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

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Educated by Tara Westover review: An extraordinary Mormon upbringing recounted with evocative lyricism

Tara westover hadn’t heard about the holocaust, wwii or martin luther king until university.

Westover’s story is so extraordinary that its bare bones would have been enough to make a fascinating book. Photograph: Kenny Crookston/BYU

During an art history lecture in her first term at Brigham Young University, Utah, Tara Westover came across a word she had never encountered before. Having seen other students ask questions, Westover raised her hand. “I don’t know this word,” she said. “What does it mean?”

What she describes as “an almost violent silence” followed. Then the professor snapped, “Thanks for that” and continued with the lecture. Afterwards a previously friendly classmate told her, “You shouldn’t make fun of that” and walked away. Confused, Westover went to the computer lab and looked up the word. Then she understood the reaction to her question. The word was “Holocaust”.

Westover was born in 1986, but until that day, she had never heard of the mass murder of Jews during the second World War. She had never heard of Napoleon, or Martin Luther King, and she thought Europe was a country. She had never set foot in a classroom or visited a doctor. She had grown up in rural Idaho in a family dominated by her father Gene, a radical Mormon survivalist who was determined to keep his seven children out of, as he saw it, the clutches of the government and the wider world.

Officially the children were being “home-schooled”, but by the time Tara was eight, all pretence at formal lessons had stopped, and she was soon working hard in the family junkyard. Schooling, according to the Westover parents, was “brainwashing”. The only other families with whom they socialised were, like them, preparing for societal breakdown or a raid by government forces. And yet today Tara, who had never been in a classroom until she went to Brigham Young University, has an M Phil and a PhD from Cambridge. How did that happen? And what else did she gain – and lose – along the way?

Westover’s story is so extraordinary that its bare bones would have been enough to make a fascinating book, so the fact that she tells it with such enormous skill and insight feels like a bonus. The narrative is perfectly paced, revealing more and more details as Westover gradually begins to see her family, whose beliefs and lifestyle she has always taken for granted, in relief for the first time.

Race, for example, isn’t mentioned at all in the book until Westover reaches college – beforehand, it simply hasn’t been something she’s thought about, growing up in an entirely white environment. But as she is hit by the reality of America’s brutal racial history, she realises that her family have wilfully or accidentally ignored and dismissed this history, “that we had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalise others.”

There is no doubt that Westover’s parents loved their children deeply. But Gene Westover’s wilful disregard for his family’s safety and wellbeing is so enraging that at times I had to put down the book and take a deep breath. The narrative is full of horrific accidents caused by his refusal to consider basic safety practices. And when these accidents take place, no doctor can be called, because doctors are tools of socialism.

But Westover never demonises him, or her mother, a midwife and herbalist who facilitated his delusions. She doesn’t even demonise her violent brother, whose behaviour provided a further impetus to get away from her stifling environment. She recounts her experiences with a matter-of-fact lyricism that is extraordinarily evocative, and which makes the emotional impact of the inevitable rift between herself and some members of her family even more powerful.

Educated reminds us that education doesn't just mean learning about history and science and art. It means learning how to think for oneself. But once a woman has learned "how to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to create my own mind, is it possible to reconcile her old and new selves?". Westover knows there is no easy answer to this question. She knows that her education has brought pain as well as fulfilment. But that education has given her ability to define her life and tell her own unforgettable story, and for that readers everywhere should be grateful.

Anna Carey's sixth novel Mollie on the March will be published in March.

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Educated by Tara Westover

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Title: Educated

Author: Tara Westover

Publisher: Random House

Genre: Memoir, coming-of-age tale

First Publication: 2018

Language: English

Major Characters: Tara Westover, Gene Westover (Her Dad), Faye Westover (Her Mother), Shawn Westover, Charles, Professor Steinberg

Theme: Memory, History, and Subjectivity; Learning and Education; Devoutness and Delusion; Family, Abuse, and Entrapment

Setting: Idaho, Utah, Cambridge

Narration: First person

Book Summary: Educated by Tara Westover

Tara Westover was 17 the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her “head-for-the-hills bag”. In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged in her father’s junkyard.

Her father forbade hospitals, so Tara never saw a doctor or nurse. Gashes and concussions, even burns from explosions, were all treated at home with herbalism. The family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education and no one to intervene when one of Tara’s older brothers became violent.

Then, lacking any formal education, Tara began to educate herself. She taught herself enough mathematics and grammar to be admitted to Brigham Young University, where she studied history, learning for the first time about important world events like the Holocaust and the civil rights movement. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge. Only then would she wonder if she’d traveled too far, if there was still a way home.

Educated is an account of the struggle for self-invention of Tara Westover. It is a tale of fierce family loyalty and of the grief that comes with severing the closest of ties. With the acute insight that distinguishes all great writers, Westover has crafted a universal coming-of-age story that gets to the heart of what an education is and what it offers: the perspective to see one’s life through new eyes and the will to change it.

Book Review: Educated by Tara Westover

Educated is a memoir of the growing up of Tara Westover. The book is split into three parts: growing up and her childhood; College, predominantly at BYU; and, further education and the cracking of familial relationships. This book, I found, was largely an exploration of her familial relationships and the empowerment of education.

This memoir starts off in Bucks Peak , where Tara grows up on the mountain, which was presented as very picturesque in writing. Without seeing pictures of the place, you could imagine the junkyard Tara use to play and work in, the animals roaming the sides of the mountain, her numerous siblings all playing around and living under her father’s roof.

“It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you.”

Tara’s father is a prominent figure in this memoir; a fundamentalist Mormon, he teaches the Mormon book as gospel and is incredibly strict in his teachings. He also states how he receives messages from God and all events in the world are leading up to The End of Days, the end of the world and so he ruthlessly enlists the help of his children and wife to prepare for this impending doom (this includes storing food and trying to dig a waterline into the mountain). Besides these views of grandeur, her father is also manipulative and often deceitful to achieve what he wants. He also has a very misogynistic view of what women should and shouldn’t be, how they should dress, etc.

Throughout childhood you see Tara complying with these ideals (for example, judging women on the length of their skirts if they are above the ankle). She doesn’t know any other way of thinking or critical thought as this is the only way she has been taught to think. She never attends school and is taught to reject societal conventions and to judge others who are unlike her, to see them as wrong.

“We are all of us more complicated than the roles we are assigned in the stories other people tell”

Tara also has to deal with an abusive and dangerous family member, her brother. He is incredibly manipulative and deceptive and uses violence. You watch her journey through self doubt and self blame, and even when she does accept it,. her family members turn a blind eye. These parts of the book were uncomfortable to read.

Through attending BYU and onto Cambridge for her doctorate, you find Tara developing as a person, but also admitting the strain between her life on the junkyard and her life at prestigious institutions in education. The gap between family and education broadens and conflicts her mind. Through education, she was empowered and her transformation was courageous. She is absolutely remarkably smart despite the containment of her family values causing her severe mental health problems. She develops critical thinking and analysis of her own life, freeing herself from the confines of her father’s teaching. The great thing about Educated by Tara Westover is that, despite her conflicts with certain family members, she was able to develop and create new familial relationships with others, leading to loving and trusting relationships.

“I began to experience the most powerful advantage of money: the ability to think of things besides money.”

Educated by Tara Westover was lyrical in prose and read as incredibly smart. From the outset you can see how smart and curious Tara was and is as a person. This book held the qualities of being heart-breaking and uplifting, but mostly exceedingly frustrating. This frustration was not from the writing but from how people can react to someone admitting that they were/are a victim of abuse. This was a remarkable story to read and Tara is an incredibly courageous and resilient person.

Educated is a memoir by Tara Westover, a woman who grows up as the youngest of seven in a rural Idaho Mormon community. She and her siblings were all born at home and are homeschooled, and her parents are deeply suspicious of the government. Her father fears the influence of the Illuminati, thought that Y2K would be the harbinger of the Second Coming, and believes public education standards are just brainwashing.

The story is told in three parts. Part One details her childhood. Westover describes her father's radicalization and the many serious (and often gruesome) injuries that her family members refuse to get medial treatment for.

In Part Two, Westover ventures to college at BYU. She describes the culture shock of being confused about what the Holocaust was or having to learn about slavery, and she struggles through her first romantic relationship. Finally in Part Three, Westover goes to Cambridge for her PhD, attempts to confront her family about their issues and brings us up to date with her life now.

(The Full Plot Summary is also available, below)

Full Plot Summary

Tara Westover grows up with in an unconventional way (no birth certificates, no medical records, etc.). She and her siblings have been raised on a mountaintop in Idaho.

Her family lives in a Mormon community, and her father, Gene , is a survivalist. He believes in self-sufficiency. His dogma becomes entrenched after an incident where the neighbors were attacked by the government. Her mother, Faye , is the town’s midwife, a practice that is illegal in Idaho. Faye had a very normal upbringing, and Tara believes Faye married Gene as rebellion against it.

Tara and her sibling don't have proper schooling, medical care and the like. When Faye is in a serious accident during the move to Idaho, she doesn't receive medical treatment, and she has chronic headaches after that. Gene is against schooling, but Tara’s oldest brother Tyler ends up going to college anyway. Tara decides she needs to go, too.

Tara also recalls an incident where her brother Luke gets burned, though he family’s recollection of what happened is all different. It's one of many incidences where there's discrepancies among her family about what happened growing up. When Y2K approaches, Gene starts getting preoccupied with preparing for Y2K and is depressed when nothing happens.

Tara has a caring relationship with her brother Shawn in some ways, but Shawn also has a dangerousness to him, and he can be mean, controlling, physically and emotionally abusive and violent. Meanwhile, Tyler encourages Tara to go to college. Young Tara wants to change her life. She takes the ACT and is accepted into BYU. Her father is firmly against it and continues to be volatile and dangerous. Her mother and other family members discreetly try to encourage her.

At BYU, Tara settles into her new, strange life. She experiences culture shock as well as difficulties in school since she is far behind the other students going in. When Tara returns home for the summer, she starts hanging out with a boy from town, Charles , and starts to see her previous life as being a little backwards. Gene and Shawn think she’s become "uppity" and call her names. Tara gets a headache, Charles gives her an ibuprofen, and Tara is shocked to experience medicine that actually works (as opposed to the home remedies she's accustomed to).

She's also stressed from financial and academic pressures, and her friends have to help her with her personal hygiene. When Charles visits her home sees the hostile, abusive environment, he feels in over his head and breaks things off with her. The church Bishop at school is supportive of Tara and tries to help her with her. He encourages her to apply for a grant, which later comes through.

During an introductory psychology course, Tara realizes that Gene likely has bipolar disorder. She starts learns the truth of the event (Ruby Ridge incident) from child. It was a drug raid, but Gene had believed the government attacked that family for their beliefs. Meanwhile, at home, Gene gets into a bad accident, and the family cares for him for weeks. When he finally heals, it strengthens Faye and Gene's beliefs that traditional medical treatment is unnecessary.

Tara decides to study abroad at Cambridge. Her professor takes an interest in her and encourages to believe in herself. When she graduates, she decides to pursue a Master’s Degree at Cambridge. As Tara begins her PhD program and after more culture shock, Tara finally starts feeling like she’s fitting in at Cambridge. On the home front, she also attempts to confront her family about Shawn's behavior. Audrey and Tara discuss Shawn's abusive behavior, but it results in more violent and angry outbursts from Shawn. When nothing changes, Tara talks to her father who refuses to believe her, and Faye tries to convince Tara her memories are wrong. Shawn says he's cutting Tara out of his life, and soon Audrey recants and cuts Tara out as well.

Tara finally tells them goodbye and walks out. Tara’s work on her PhD suffers, but she’s able to get back on track when Tyler surprisingly supports her. Tara gets her PhD. In the final chapters, Tara goes home after a long absence, but has not reconciled with her parents.

The book ends with Tara reflecting on her fractured family. When Faye's mother passes away, Tara goes to the funeral, but sits apart from them. Shawn does not look at Tara during the service. As of the publication of the book many years later, the funeral is the last time Tara has seen her parents.

For more detail, see the full Section-by-Section Summary .

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Book Review

Educated , by Tara Westover, was one of the bestselling books on 2018 and has continued to top the charts even now, despite being released over a year ago. I put it on my to-read list thanks to Bill Gate’s book blog , and Ellen Degeneres read it after Michelle Obama recommended it to her.

Point is, if you’re reading this book, at least you know you’re in good company.

( Update 8/2020 : LaRee Westover — “Faye” in the book, the mother of Tara Westover, has written a book called “Educating” that’s partially a response to Educated. She’s crowdfunding it on Indiegogo . )

Educated opens with an episode from Westover’s childhood. She is six years old. As it was explained to her, a nearby family, the Weavers, has been under siege and shot at by the government for being “freedom fighters,” resulting in the deaths of the mom and a 14-year-old boy. (In reality, the Weavers were in a raid gone awry for possessing illegal weapons .) It’s a formative experience, marking the point where her father starts to transform into a radicalized survivalist, and Westover wonders in the book a few times what he would have been like if she’d known him before that.

Westover writes that “four of my parents’ seven children don’t have birth certificates. We have no medical records because we were born at home and have never seen a doctor or nurse. We have no school records because we’ve never set foot in a classroom.”

Author Tara Westover

The Good Stuff

Educated is a fascinating book on multiple levels. As a personal journey for Westover, it’s triumphant and hopeful. Westover goes from receiving very little education to eventually getting her PhD at Cambridge.

As a story, it’s unique. Westover’s experiences make for a distinctive perspective, accented with colorful anecdotes.

And as a reader, it’s interesting to consider how her perspective is shaped by the usual fallacies of memory and perspective.

For example, as I was reading, I wondered if the event she describes in the first chapter was as dramatic as she believes, or if the drama of it was heightened by being told about it at a young age and slowly building a mythos out of it. How would she have viewed her father if no one had ever later described the scene to her?

Some Criticisms and Caveats

To be honest, Educated is not the type of book I would’ve selected if it weren’t for its overwhelming popularity. It’s highly personal and not a topic I’m particularly interested in. But the story was compelling enough that I found myself invested in it, even if it did drag in a few parts.

I couldn’t help feeling, though, that perhaps Westover wrote this book too soon. It seems like the story we’re reading is the one she’s constructed to make sense of everything that happened to her, but I imagine she still has a longer journey to really process it all and what it means.

Some parts of the book, especially when it comes to her own behavior seem too neat and tidy to be the whole story. When her father offers her a blessing, she responds “I love you. But I can’t. I’m sorry, Dad” and he just walks out of the room. Scenes like that feel more like a made-for-TV movie than the truth.

When the book concludes, things are essentially unresolved with her family. I would be surprised if that’s where their story ends, even if they made some big mistakes.

Educated vs. Hillbilly Elegy

There have been a number of comparisons of Educated with J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy , but they’re fairly different books. Hillbilly Elegy is a much more political book that’s trying to explain the economic conditions impacting white working-class Appalachian communities. Meanwhile, though Westover’s memoir involves a family that is geographically rooted in Trumpland, her story isn’t meant to be representative of Trump voters or even of her Mormon community in Southern Idaho.

Westover’s father has more radical views than most in their religious community. He firmly believes women shouldn’t work, and he’s a survivalist, busy hoarding food and being paranoid about potential attacks from the government and whatnot. Westover discusses how he likely has an untreated personality disorder.

Read it or Skip It?

I enjoyed parts of Educated. It’s an inherently interesting story, and one that’s worth telling.

It’s not a book I would have normally chosen for myself if it weren’t for all the glowing endorsements, but I’m glad I gave it a shot. For me, it didn’t quite live up to the hype, but I do feel like I got something out of her story.

Have you read this book or would you consider reading it? See Educated on Amazon .

Tara Westover’s Family and Responses to Educated

I went through a lot of the comments that her family has made publicly (on Facebook, Amazon, and Goodreads, etc.) about the book, and it seems Westover’s family members have been vocal about their disagreement (“lies”, according to them) with some of the parts of the book. However, throughout Educated, Westover often acknowledges the question marks in her memories, and it seems like they mostly take issue with the overall portrayal as opposed to disputing specific facts.

To be fair, it does seem like her family members are not quite the bumpkins she makes them out to be. At one point in the book, her mom has to force her dad’s hand in getting a phone line installed, for example. However, in reality they don’t seem as backwards — they run a business and are pretty active on Facebook and whatnot. Her mom comments frequently on the book.

Tara gives many of her family monikers in the book, but in actuality her parents are Val (“ Gene “) and LaRee Westover (“ Faye “). “Shawn” is the nickname for Travis. (Tyle, Richard and Luke Westover are referred to by their actual names in the book.) Her older sister Valaree (“ Audrey “) and her mother run an essential oils business together. It has a Facebook , Instagram and even a YouTube channel. They even sell a book about essential oils . The family’s lawyer claims it has 30 employees, multiple facilities and relies on an automated assembly line ( PDF version in case that link goes down).

On the other hand, it’s worth mentioning that her brother — or at least someone claiming to be him — Tyler (real name) has come out with extensive comments that don’t seem to contradict the book. He noted some inaccuracies in her perceptions ( PDF version ), but seems to corroborate large parts of the story. Also, Richard (also his real name)’s profile on his university’s website ( PDF version ) corroborates the spotty education they received as kids: “Westover said he is probably the only ISU masters-level chemist who had to start with a beginning math course at ISU.”

In the comments of one of the articles linked above, Richard Westover has also responded to the book with the following:

“The relationship between my sister and my parents, like that of many poeple, is more complicated than either this article or the book can portray. Tara is doing the best she can with what she knows and I give her kudos as well for that. I think people reading either the book or the article should suspend judgement. Having read both, and lived through it as well, I would not consider myself in possesion of the facts tsufficient to pass judgement to the extent many of the commenters seem to be willing to do. To you it is a book and it is cheap to rant about it. To me, it is my life and I’m still living it. Tara comes to my house to visit occasionally and I still call my parents every week.”

Important Note : While they seem to want to share their side of the story, its seems sad that many people have taken that as an invitation to harass her family. As a reminder, they’re private citizens responding to a story about themselves. John Oliver did a fantastic piece on public shaming . He discusses how it’s often a useful tool, but also how it can be abused. I hope no one reads this book and thinks that the main takeaway should be “I need to go harass these private citizens / people I don’t know RIGHT NOW.”

Book Excerpt

Read the first pages of Educated

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Great review!!

thank you! and thanks for dropping by!

I really liked Educated but I see what you mean by saying there will probably be more to the story. Really thorough review!

I can see why people liked it so much for sure, I think I probably had unrealistic expectations reading it this late in the game — thanks for dropping by!

Great review of the book, both of its attributes and its faults. I think the book treads an often invisible line of reporting memories versus reporting facts, and I appreciated that Westover was open about the possibility that the two might not be the same for her. The book really spoke to me as an educator who possesses a fair amount of privilege, but I think we can all learn something about the importance of not writing people off as lost causes simply because they are ignorant. I’m glad you found some value in her story, even if you didn’t love it. (It’s so easy to be disappointed by such great hype!)

Thank you, Veronica! I agree, I liked that she is really open about admitting that she’s only recounting her memories of what happened. And yes! I think it’s so true that there’s a lot of valuable lessons to be learned from her story. I’m glad people are reading it. Honestly, I think it’s just in certain parts where I knew where the story was headed (I’d heard her talk about the book before reading it, etc.), I got a little bit bored once I sort of had the gist of what was going on (but I think that’s just my own impatience). Plus with all the hype, I had like CRAZY expectations, haha. Thank you for your insightful comments!

Loved the review!

Thank you! And thanks for reading!

Great review. You really dug into the background. You made some good points about how soon this was written after. I do usually think it takes some time to make sense of our past.

Thank you catherine!

Terrific review, thanks

thank you! :)

very nice review!!

thank you very much! :)

I heard about this book. I need to read it but I fear it might break my heart before I get to the end so I have to gear myself up for it. Really a well-written write/up. I hope the author sees your post.

Thank you so much and thanks for reading!

Very thoughtful review. Thanks!

Thank you, much appreciated!

Great review! I have been wanting to read this book for so long now, but just end up choosing something else always for some reason.

Thank you! Hope you enjoy it if you get a chance to read it!

The waitlist for this book is nuts. I feel like I’ve been waiting forever. I love stories about people who grow up in unusual situations, so I think I’ll like this one. Great review!

oh yes, if that’s what interests you, I definitely think you should read it! Thanks for dropping by! Hope you get off the waitlist soon! :)

Been thinking about reading this one for a while now, thank you for the great review!

thank you! hope you like it if you get a chance to read it!

Excellent review! Although it’s not a book I would usually be drawn to, your review made me curious enough to give it a try.

That’s great to hear, thank you!

Your review of Educated was the most honest of all the ones I’ve read. Thank you!

Are Educated and Hillbilly Elegy novels? I thought they were biographical memoirs and considered non fiction. maybe that’s where people get caught up in trying to find out if it’s true or not. If it’s a novel, then just take as a story, not the truth.

I can’t wait to read it.

Fantastic articulation of a story that has something for everyone. With or without the abusive factor, I felt she told her story in a way that would benefit anyone’s family situation. The abusive factors, the dangers inherent in the working situations she experienced as a child, only added to our insights into these relationships. So many episodes in the book gave me personal emotions, but one favorite scene is when Tara is on the rooftop in england with her professor and her classmates. The wind is fierce and would scare anyone. Tara walks up to edge of roof, standing as if there is no wind and has no fear. Her professor comes near her and observes how her classmates are huddled together in the middle of the roof, bent forward and facing sideways so the wind won’t sweep them away. Tara, for all her differences growing up, stands like a superman in front of the other girls.

Her stories, like the roof scene, weave together a larger story of a life filled with unique experiences that might bring anyone to their knees. She survives all this in such a way that she shows all of us that, if we stick to it and really try, we can be supermen, too. Thank you, Tara, for sharing your love and strength. Beautiful book.

I enjoyed your review until you commented that the crazy Westover’s radical beliefs were firmly in Trumpland. Really?? What on earth do their views have to do with the average Trump supporter? You, obviously have no idea.

Hi Karen, I write in the review that their family is located in Trumpland (as in, located in an area where people generally support Trump) but their beliefs are NOT representative and are actually considered extreme, even for their community.

Hope this clears things up. Best, Jenn

Loved the book but very upset with the people in Preston. Why didn’t they step in to help her and why didn’t someone do something about “Shawn”? Preston is a small town where everyone knows everyone’s business. I know as I grew up in several small towns in southern Idaho. I admire Tara with what she has down with her life.

I was impressed with the book because I personally relate to it. Like Tara, I lacked a high school education and BYU gave me a chance no one else would have. I am even more impressed when I have listened to her interviews. She is in the same position that I have been my entire life. I know good people on both sides of our divided country and we desperately need intelligent people like Tara to be able to discourse with both side and bring reason to our crumbling society.

I agree with Karen. Labeling an area of the country “Trumpland” reeks of a kind of racism. Albeit not the most common kind, but in my opinion still shows ignorance. Trump has actually gotten some pretty important things done in our country. Do your research.

How would it be racism, also read the reviewers reply, it clears up what she meant

I read this a few years ago, right after it came out. Her mother is releasing her side of the story this coming year and I just pre-ordered it. I own one of LaRee’s books already, and buy her products on a regular basis. Her mother is nothing short of incredible, even if her father is possibly insane. Because of LaRee’s new book, I have revisited Tara’s book. This review is much better than most of the reviews I have read, and interviews I have watched. Thank you for that. I am very frustrated at most readers’ inability to see what this book is about. It is not about “Mormonism” or homeschooling or education or natural medicine at all. It is about mental illness and abuse. Her focus on being off the grid, Mormon, and homeschooled or unschooled takes away from the real story. I feel like all of the interviews I have watched have focused on the fact that she was born at home, unschooled (which is what she was, yet no one has done enough research before an interview to name it as such), and never went to the doctor. There are a great many families that practice natural medicine and unschool that don’t need her form of “education”. I unschool my children, practice natural medicine and am a Latter Day Saint. We also live in Idaho and are self employed. I have many friends who choose the same lifestyle. However, my children are very confident, know they are safe and loved, and have had very magical childhoods free from the pressures of school. So far we have one college graduate. We belong to several homeschool groups and have a rich life free from the restraint of the mainstream. She generalizes the the movements that she attacks. Her interviews make me sick. She ignores the horrible parts of her life in the book and focuses on the lack of “education”. Her unschooling and being un-vaxed had nothing to do with her trauma. Thank you for focusing on the trauma and seeing the book for what it truly is.

I just finished Educated and it was great. It is hard to believe what some children have to live through to become adults. It appears to me that Tara has done a great job of raising and educating herself. She reminds me of Jeanette Walls from the Glass Castle. Great informative review.

I just finished the book last night and your review was spot on. I didn’t think I would get into it the way I did but it definitely held my interest

An interesting review. As a child of an emotionally abusive parent (who now swears she doesn’t remember half of the things her kids recount to her) I can easily see where the disconnect between Tara and her parents’ narrative lies. As a child we miss intention behind parents’ action. As a parent we miss the impact. The truth likely lies somewhere in between. But – and this is obviously a bias of my own experience – I know I believe none of her story was concocted.

Hey, thanks for your thoughts. That’s definitely a useful perspective to consider as well. I appreciate you sharing your comment!

I just finished the book and so appreciate d Tara’s story. This is a personal account of one person’s struggle to understand, deal with and overcome abuse from within a family. Is is fair for any of us to judge her journey through this? Why does it matter? I commend this young woman for examining herself, her life and her worth in it. Her willingness to offer this story to anyone who may need to hear it is truly a gift. If it speaks to you in some way, drink it in. If not, let it pass over you. This is art.

thank you for this post! i love it

thanks umi!

Hi and thank you for inviting my thoughts here. Having a little extra time on my hands recently has allowed me to revisit some of the themes explored in Educated. It’s funny because I recently sought out some perspectives on the book from a few sites. Bill Gates’ perspective mostly focuses on Tara’s ability to be self taught. He emphasizes how impressive Tara is and rightly so. Having been brought up without access to any sort of education, her tenacity and intrinsic motivation to learn and become educated are truly mind-blowing. And as important as this particular theme is to both Tara personally, and the theme of education itself, it is not what made me consider Educated over and over for the past year.

The other theme, as many of you may know, is mental illness and how it can truly destroy family members, and eventually destroy not just the family dynamic, but the family as a permanent institution. Along with the mental illness and abuse, I found myself personally recognizing and feeling a very sad connection to the constant denial and enabling, as well as the crushing betrayal and eventual decision on Tara’s part to break ties with family members. This is where I really connected with Tara. If there were a support group for people who have either been abandoned by family members or who have been forced to end relationships with family members, I think maybe people like Tara and I would truly benefit. From my perspective, it’s your worst nightmare. You never really make a clean break from even the most mentally ill and/or abusive siblings. You think about them and worry about them, even though you know there’s nothing left that you can do. It is a pain that is truly debilitating. I sincerely thank Tara for the time and hard work that went into sharing her story. No one likes to feel that they are the only one who has ever experienced a particular kind of tragic loss. There are support groups for grieving, but not for this kind of grief. Alas, Educated helped me to see that I am not walking this path alone. For some of us, family is not forever.

Tara Westover’s story is extraordinary. It is remarkable that three of the off spring went on to receive PhDs.. It is sad and disturbing that “Shawn” never received the mental help he needed. There is a thread if mental illness that runs through the family.. Congrats to Tara for overcoming such difficulties. I think there may be more to come.

This was my first book of 2022. It was eye-opening for me to say the least. While I think it is told from Tara’s perspective, I wish to remind everyone that for a person to share the truth of their family life requires great courage and is often sugar coated. It is an extremely difficult thing to do. Thank you Tara for being so brave. Your courage has given me strength 🙏🏻

An Elegant Defense gives you all the context you need to understand the science of immunity.

Quest for knowledge

Educated is even better than you’ve heard

Melinda and I loved Tara Westover’s journey from the mountains of Idaho to the halls of Cambridge.

I’ve always prided myself on my ability to teach myself things. Whenever I don’t know a lot about something, I’ll read a textbook or watch an online course until I do.

I thought I was pretty good at teaching myself—until I read Tara Westover’s memoir Educated . Her ability to learn on her own blows mine right out of the water. I was thrilled to sit down with her recently to talk about the book.

Tara was raised in a Mormon survivalist home in rural Idaho. Her dad had very non-mainstream views about the government. He believed doomsday was coming, and that the family should interact with the health and education systems as little as possible. As a result, she didn’t step foot in a classroom until she was 17, and major medical crises went untreated (her mother suffered a brain injury in a car accident and never fully recovered).

Because Tara and her six siblings worked at their father’s junkyard from a young age, none of them received any kind of proper homeschooling. She had to teach herself algebra and trigonometry and self-studied for the ACT , which she did well enough on to gain admission to Brigham Young University. Eventually, she earned her doctorate in intellectual history from Cambridge University. (Full disclosure: she was a Gates Scholar, which I didn’t even know until I reached that part of the book.)

Educated is an amazing story, and I get why it’s spent so much time on the top of the New York Times bestseller list. It reminded me in some ways of the Netflix documentary Wild, Wild Country , which I recently watched. Both explore people who remove themselves from society because they have these beliefs and knowledge that they think make them more enlightened. Their belief systems benefit from their separateness, and you’re forced to be either in or out.

But unlike Wild, Wild Country —which revels in the strangeness of its subjects— Educated doesn’t feel voyeuristic. Tara is never cruel, even when she’s writing about some of her father’s most fringe beliefs. It’s clear that her whole family, including her mom and dad, is energetic and talented. Whatever their ideas are, they pursue them.

Of the seven Westover siblings, three of them—including Tara—left home, and all three have earned Ph.D.s. Three doctorates in one family would be remarkable even for a more “conventional” household. I think there must’ve been something about their childhood that gave them a degree of toughness and helped them persevere. Her dad taught the kids that they could teach themselves anything, and Tara’s success is a testament to that.

I found it fascinating how it took studying philosophy and history in school for Tara to trust her own perception of the world. Because she never went to school, her worldview was entirely shaped by her dad. He believed in conspiracy theories, and so she did, too. It wasn’t until she went to BYU that she realized there were other perspectives on things her dad had presented as fact. For example, she had never heard of the Holocaust until her art history professor mentioned it. She had to research the subject to form her own opinion that was separate from her dad’s.

Her experience is an extreme version of something everyone goes through with their parents. At some point in your childhood, you go from thinking they know everything to seeing them as adults with limitations. I’m sad that Tara is estranged from a lot of her family because of this process, but the path she’s taken and the life she’s built for herself are truly inspiring.

When you meet her, you don’t have any impression of all the turmoil she’s gone through. She’s so articulate about the traumas of her childhood, including the physical abuse she suffered at the hands of one brother. I was impressed by how she talks so candidly about how naïve she once was—most of us find it difficult to talk about our own ignorance.

I was especially interested to hear her take on polarization in America. Although it’s not a political book, Educated touches on a number of the divides in our country: red states versus blue states, rural versus urban, college-educated versus not. Since she’s spent her whole life moving between these worlds, I asked Tara what she thought. She told me she was disappointed in what she called the “breaking of charity”—an idea that comes from the Salem witch trials and refers to the moment when two members of the same group break apart and become different tribes.

“I worry that education is becoming a stick that some people use to beat other people into submission or becoming something that people feel arrogant about,” she said. “I think education is really just a process of self-discovery—of developing a sense of self and what you think. I think of [it] as this great mechanism of connecting and equalizing.”

Tara’s process of self-discovery is beautifully captured in Educated . It’s the kind of book that I think everyone will enjoy, no matter what genre you usually pick up. She’s a talented writer, and I suspect this book isn’t the last we’ll hear from her. I can’t wait to see what she does next.

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Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, educated: a memoir.

Tara Westover was born and raised beneath a majestic mountain affectionately called the Princess. The youngest of seven children in rural Idaho, she spent most of her time outside or helping her mother create the herbal tinctures that supplemented the family’s income.

The short prologue to Westover’s memoir, EDUCATED, begins with a lovely description of the family farm, the swaths of sagebrush and thistle coming down the hills toward the house. But this idyll of family and the tranquility of nature are soon shattered. The Westover family are fundamentalist Mormons but are outliers even in their community. Only the oldest three children had ever been to school, and they never had any medical care or treatment. Westover’s father, who she speculates has an undiagnosed mental illness, was a paranoid bully who was constantly preparing for the end of the world.

"Westover’s writing style is straightforward, even as she recounts heart-wrenching details and abusive events.... EDUCATED is a terrific, if harrowing, read."

When she turned 16, inspired by her older brother, Westover began to think about college as a way to escape her dangerous and suffocating home environment. Her journey from the chaos of her home amid her father’s junkyard to the ivy-covered walls and libraries of Cambridge will enthrall readers.

There are many fascinating threads to the story Westover weaves in EDUCATED. The context here is important but also complicated. The Westovers were on the fringes of traditional Mormonism. While most of their neighbors sent their children to public school, to the doctor for check-ups and injuries, and let them participate in various activities, Westover’s father distrusted the schools and the medical profession, not to mention the government and other Mormons. Physical ailments, including some astonishingly serious ones, were treated with homemade herbal remedies and salves, and later by “energy healing.” Apart from a short-lived period of community theater and an even shorter-lived period of dance lessons, Westover was isolated from other children. She was taught to read but had no formal education in math, history or science until she left home for BYU after teaching herself trigonometry and more to prepare for the ACT.

The adjustments she had to make in order to attend college cannot be understated. From hygiene to social skills to study habits, Westover was vastly unprepared for her new life. Brilliant and committed, she worked hard, driven by both a desire to learn and a sense of self-preservation that meant breaking free of her family. Her successes are just as uplifting to read about as her familial life is frankly terrifying. Westover is careful not to indict religion in general or Mormonism in particular, and presents the story of her upbringing as specifically her own; of course, though, it is the lens through which her parents see the world.

Westover’s writing style is straightforward, even as she recounts heart-wrenching details and abusive events. Her quest for autonomy, learning, understanding and acceptance can break your heart, even as it has you cheering for her empowerment. EDUCATED is a terrific, if harrowing, read.

Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman on February 22, 2018

Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover

Publication Date: February 8, 2022
Genres: Memoir , Nonfiction
Paperback: 368 pages
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN-10: 0399590528
ISBN-13: 9780399590528

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Book Review

Educated by Tara Westover

Publisher: Random House | Genre: Memoir, coming-of-age tale

Title: Educated

Author: Tara Westover

Publisher: Random House

Genre: Memoir, coming-of-age tale

First Publication: 2018

Language: English

Major Characters: Tara Westover, Gene Westover (Her Dad), Faye Westover (Her Mother), Shawn Westover, Charles, Professor Steinberg

Theme: Memory, History, and Subjectivity; Learning and Education; Devoutness and Delusion; Family, Abuse, and Entrapment

Setting: Idaho, Utah, Cambridge

Narration: First person

Book Summary: Educated by Tara Westover

Book Review: Educated by Tara Westover

Educated by Tara Westover is an anguished story about growing up in the mountains of Idaho in a fundamentalist Mormon/survivalist family led by a father convinced that the socialist government in every respect was evil. As a family they prepared for “The Days of Abomination” and saw the opposition as The Illuminati. They lived pretty much “off the grid” for a long time—birthing at home (Tara’s mom is a midwife and herbalist; her Dad ran a junkyard). They had no birth certificates, no social security numbers, went to no doctors, had no contact with any media, and had no public schooling at all.

In the mountains she was defined largely by her father and brother, Sean, who were abusive, and throughout she painfully struggles with how to honor her father and his narrow, paranoid version of the world as she learned everything that was largely denied her.

“I believed then–and part of me will always believe–that my father’s words ought to be my own.”

This was a well-written, gripping story, and I never read these kinds of stories but it was highly reviewed and much awarded so I thought I would try it and am glad I did. But it was also really uncomfortable to read. It weighed on me as I read it. I thought of largely discredited memoirs and wondered if this would become one of those, as her story is hard to fathom–both the horrific parts and the successful parts–her escape is almost unbelievable.

She also has what she describes as a nervous breakdown at one point as her family thought she was evil and dangerous for not following her father’s dictates to live in the home and (dangerously) work for him as a scrapper. Her father is crazy and her brother Sean is crazy-violent, threatening to kill her, and no one agrees with her side of the story. A nightmare. And though she escapes this world, she never is entirely happy, as she loses her family—such as it is–in the process.

“You can love someone and still choose to say goodbye to them,” she says now. “You can miss a person every day, and still be glad that they are no longer in your life.”

In her view, her mother, forced to become an unlicensed midwife by her husband, was a tower of womanly strength, devoted to her bipolar, authoritarian husband. The family had to bow to his will, paralysed by his delusions, or leave, and she eventually left. One trigger for Westover’s father, as it was for many survivalists then, was a paranoid interpretation of the Ruby Ridge “killing” of Randy Weaver, another survivalist. Early on, Dad interpreted the Holy Bible as telling him that, for instance, milk was sinful and they only used molasses and honey thereafter. He was crazy in so many ways, and only Tara had the strength to finally tell the truth about him and her brother. Everyone else in her family bowed down to him.

Tara Westover, almost unbelievably not only graduated from BYU, but went on to graduate with a PhD in History from Cambridge, becoming truly “educated” about herself, her family, and the world. At Cambridge a Dr. Kerry attempts to cure her of her impostor syndrome, recognizing her special talents and writer and thinker.

“My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs.”

This book resonates with present time in the world where white supremacism, separatism, survivalism, fundamentalism, sexism, and mental derangement seem to be ascendant. At the university, in her first class she only had heard the name—Shakespeare, but had to drop it because it was a senior level course. She learned from a roommate that the reason she failed the midterm in Art History is that she had to actually read the textbook. She had never been in school of any kind!

In the university she learned of the Holocaust and slavery, really for the first time; she learned of bipolar disorder, paranoid schizophrenia, she learned of antibiotics and went to a doctor for the first time, she accepted a student grant from the government, all socialist acts her family knew the university and the government would corrupt her with. That she keeps going home where she has been threatened and hurt and lied to resonates with familiar abuse scenarios. But ultimately she finds the courage to go with her new life and not her old one.

I thought that The Glass Castle was the ultimate memoir for dangerous and negligent parenting, but Westover has managed to swipe that unwanted crown. Westover has a uniquely compelling, incredibly harrowing survival story – survival of religious fundamentalism, survival of emotional and physical abuse, survival of being thrown like a fish onto dry land into a world about which she knew nothing. That she not only survived but excelled in this world, studying at Harvard and receiving a Ph.D. from Cambridge, is a testament to her intellectual gifts as well as her courage. And as this memoir makes clear, an inborn talent for exceptional writing doesn’t hurt either.

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EDUCATED BOOK REVIEW, A MEMOIR BY TARA WESTOVER

Educated by Tara Westover is a memoir that is both inspirational and shocking. An emotional rollercoaster, I felt like I was growing right alongside Tara as she discovered herself and came to terms with the current and past abuse from her family. An amazing retelling of her past and one of the top books published in 2018. Keep reading for my full Educated book review.

As part of my 101 Things in 1001 Days Challenge, I promised to review every book I read for the next two years. Educated marks the 9th book review of this year.

If you’re interested in more books I’m excited about, make sure to check out my list !

Educated by Tara Westover

Published by: Harper Collins Publication Date: February 20th, 2018 Genre: Autobiography, Memoir

MY REVIEW OF EDUCATED BY TARA WESTOVER

Educated by Tara Westover is a memoir that describes a coming-of-age story of a young girl who grew up in a fundamentalist, Mormon, family. It’s a story of hardship, growth, and triumph. Tara experiences conflict, abuse, and finally discovers a world outside of it.

Wonderfully written, Tara Westover’s writing style is that of a narrative and story-teller. It is descriptive and captivating, which causes the reader to lose themselves in her unique life story.

There were moments I couldn’t relate to, however, there were plenty of instances that anybody could share in her shoes.

MORMONISM AND FUNDAMENTALISTS

Tara Westover was born to a Fundamentalist Mormon family in Idaho in 1986.

Fundamentalism is defined as:

“A religious movement characterized by a strict belief in the literal interpretation of religious texts, especially of American Protestantism and Islam.”

She was isolated from growing up the way most Mormon children did. Her father rejected any sort of government system – eg. registering her birth, public school system, and the medical establishment. So she grew up without an education and Western medicine.

As Fundamentalists, her family followed the writings in the Bible literally. They were survivalists preparing for the end of the world, stocking up on herbal remedies, canned peaches, gasoline, and ammunition.

This was the context in which our author grew up.

TARA WESTOVER AND FAMILY DYNAMICS

The family dynamics of the Westover family is that of a traditional hierarchical family model in which the father is the head of the household. He runs a junkyard where his 7 children help with the tasks. Tara’s mother prepares herbal medicines and works as a midwife. Life in the Westover family was managed by her father.

Acting as “God’s supervisor”, he ensured his family wasn’t straying from what he interpreted as right and wrong. His concern that each member of the family was doing God’s bidding. However, at times his determination to follow the Bible exactly edged on fanatical. We would later learn that he was probably bipolar or schizophrenic.

Tara’s mother submitted to her husband’s wishes and lived her life according to his wishes. At times we get a glimpse of her own opinions. However, usually, she sets them aside for the sake of her marriage.

Tara also introduces us to her 6 siblings. We interestingly learn that half of them followed the same path as Tara, and the other three continued to live like her father. It’s evident how strong family values are within their family dynamics.

DOMESTIC ABUSE

A recurring theme throughout the book is domestic abuse, and it was probably one of the hardest parts to read. Through her memoir, Tara recounts the abuse she endured from her parents and some of her siblings.

She is physically and mentally abused from her teenage years onward by her brother Shawn. Naturally giving into the criticism of the men in her life, Tara wasn’t aware that she was being abused until a bishop explained it to her. She had been led to believe she was dressing and acting like a “whore” when in actuality she had just hit puberty. He would physically abuse her if she retaliated against his lectures, apologize soon afterward and the cycle continued into her adult life.

Her father’s choices to isolate his children, his carelessness that resulted in multiple life-threatening injuries to himself and his family, and his strict moral standards could also be considered as abusive. Not to mention his mental state which would have exacerbated it.

Tara would eventually come to realize what actually happened when she was a child. This realization would have negative consequences for her relationship with her family as they eventually estranged her.

MENTAL ILLNESSES

Mental illness plays a huge roll in Educated. We learn and witness her father’s bipolar and schizophrenic outbursts, Tara’s mental breakdown likely caused by PTSD, and her battle with imposter syndrome .

Tara’s father’s paranoia towards the government establishment, his careless behavior, and argumentative outbursts are evidence of a mood disorder. It’s unclear what he has because he’s never diagnosed but we can assume his actions and thinking are a result of it.

Through the telling of her memoir, we step into her shoes and experience this, which at times is disturbing. After leaving the family home to pursue an education, Tara feels out of place. She has a sense that she doesn’t belong and doesn’t deserve the opportunities that are presented to her. As an outsider, we root for her and are inspired by the success she has. However, dealing with imposter syndrome Tara Westover couldn’t see that.

One of the most difficult parts of the book is Tara’s mental breakdown while studying for her Ph.D. at Cambridge. The weight of her upbringing, trauma, abuse and the choices she had to make for herself became too much.

THE COST OF OUR CHOICES

If there’s one thing I took away from the entire narrative of her memoir it’s that you can’t choose where you come from but you can choose what to do with it.

Tara left Idaho embarrassed about her origins and afraid to fit in with her new surroundings. She didn’t exactly belong anywhere for a while as she transitioned and adapted. Eventually, she completes her B.A., Masters and Ph.D., came to terms with her past and excited about her future. She took her experience growing up in a Fundamentalist Mormon family in Idaho and used it to fuel her research and growth as a person.

Tara chose her education (the discovery of her own person) over her family. At no fault to herself, her father would not accept the choices she made and chose to alienate his daughter.

EDUCATED BOOK REVIEW – RATING

As I was reading the memoir I thought I was going to rate it a 4. However, I became increasingly invested in Tara’s coming-of-age story, giving it a 5 out of 5 stars on Goodreads.

If you enjoyed Wild or Angela’s Ashes, and enjoy narratives of misery and triumph, I recommend reading Educated by Tara Westover.

If you read the memoir I want to know your thoughts! Were you horrified by Shawn’s abusive behavior? Were you rooting for Tara as she came of her own? Share in the comments section below!

A full-time, multi-passionate, online entrepreneur and blogger. When I’m not managing the Pinterest accounts of my clients, I’m sipping a latte, escaping in a good book, and cuddling with my cats. Introverted and proud!

One Comment

I read it 2 yrs. ago. Absorbing but sometimes hard to take in terms of family violence re her brother, etc. It was given to me as 1 of my Christmas gifts.

A Psychologist's Take on Tara Westover's Memoir, Educated

A memoir that asks us to deeply reflect on identity and family..

Posted April 2, 2018 | Reviewed by Lybi Ma

In "Educated," Tara Westover describes a deeply troubling childhood whose lasting impact cannot be denied.
Both environmental stressors and genetics can contribute to the development of mental illness.
"Educated" encourages profound reflection on who one becomes after stepping outside the shadows of family.

I finished the book late a few nights ago, having not heard of the book at all only a week prior. Blame my discounted Oprah magazine subscription with its list of top books to read. Beneath a bright image of the book was a small but impactful endorsement of the tale. In fact, I have never picked up any of the books on her list because as a clinical psychologist I get enough secondary trauma in my day job that makes me vigilant about protecting myself during off hours. I also typically am not drawn toward memoirs as a genre. But the notion of a survivalist family was intriguing to me as an Oregonian who is used to hearing terms such as “off the grid” and “anti-establishment” on the regular.

As I combed through Amazon reviews of Educated , I was struck by the controversy as well. Although there has been overwhelming support for the book, there have also been accusations of more fiction than fact. Individuals from all walks of life, both those known to the Westover family and outside of their world completely have weighed in. What has been missed perhaps throughout the dialogue is not just the story of a bright and deeply courageous young woman escaping a lifetime of abuse, but rather a story of identity formation in the face of severe parental mental illness.

A deeply troubling childhood

In Educated , Westover describes a deeply troubling childhood whose lasting impact simply cannot be denied. Whether the story is exaggerated or not, if even a quarter of what happened to her were true, it would still be deemed highly traumatic , to say the least. The sheer number of times witnessing burns, bloodied family members, and car crashes is enough to give any individual PTSD .

Add to that a brother who by the account provided in the memoir should in actuality be contacted by Child and Protective Services (CPS). As therapists, we begin each and every intake session with limits to confidentiality, one of which is the knowledge of abuse or neglect of a minor or impaired adult. This meant that when I was an intern at UC Berkeley’s student counseling center, the mere mention of a father who was previously abusive having current exposure or access to any minors would warrant a phone call to CPS. Furthermore, the threats and violence implied by Westover’s brother Shawn would deem necessary a call to police via California’s famous Tarasoff law, otherwise known as “Duty to Warn.”

Disturbing throughout the book was, of course, Westover’s propensity toward continually revisiting the scene of the crime . The only assurance I had that she was still alive was the fact that the book had been published post hoc. As I retold and read aloud passages of the book to my husband, even he was shocked that Westover allowed herself to be alone with Shawn again and again. He astutely asked me, “Does she have Stockholm Syndrome?” Although I had never considered it, being so absorbed by the memoir, there is a good chance he was absolutely right. There is a bonding that happens between victim and captor and there is no doubt that Tara was the victim to Shawn’s twisted violent and abusive antics.

The possibility of Tara's own "madness"

Appreciated throughout the memoir was Westover’s own inquiry into the possibility of her own “madness” so to speak. Was she imagining things? Was her memory to be trusted? Could she find evidence? These are the challenging aspects of her story.

While proof is sought out in first-person accounts and inquisition, little proof is needed when examining the psychological ramifications of these events. We need not look further than Westover’s loss of her first love and second significant relationship to see how deeply family issues can invade and destroy future lasting unions. Westover’s own mental breakdowns, accounts of waking up screaming in the streets, of staying in bed all day is not unlike an offshoot of her father’s mental illness sprouting a small seed within her. After all, it is not just genetic predisposition, but also environmental stressors under which severe mental illness develops.

It was disheartening reading about Westover’s first brushes with the pulchritude of Italy juxtaposed with desperate emails and calls from family a world away. The conflict is very real and one that many of us have dealt with—how do we honor our families especially when mental illness causes such deep disruption in our own equanimity? The self-care and boundaries that therapists so frequently tout pertain to the reality that without a full cup of our own, we are only draining away our own vital energies when tending to the needs of others. It is that ubiquitous airplane video of securing our own mask before those of others near us.

The privilege of education

Whether fully accurate or only partially so, Educated is a deeply inspiring and thought-provoking read on the fire within each and every one of us to overcome adversity should we fight hard enough for it. As a contemporary of Westover’s (we were born one year apart), I recall a life dotted with far fewer screens and media that encouraged the perusal of texts with pages you could hold in your two hands. As a therapist to young adults, many of whom come from ample privilege, I am struck by how hard some have fought for their education such as Westover, while others waste it away, calling all of life beyond their screens a bore.

Stories such as Westover’s remind us of the privilege of education, and opportunities, and the real meaning of diversity. It is not just about gender politics , racial wars, or gun control. It is also ironically about understanding how a small subset of those controlling media outlets hardly shows the full picture of what it means to be an American. The story of the Westovers is just one of many who lived through a recession, in economic hardship, with limited education, and mental illness. In fact, I hardly see it as a story of Mormonism at all, only a subtext that lingers in the background. Fundamentalism occurs throughout many major religions. I am grateful that such stories are being published as they are the stories that need to be heard. While Educated is heart-wrenching at times, there are also incredibly tender moments of a brother leaving behind a beloved choir music CD for a sister, and her studying at a borrowed desk working toward her education. It is a story that encourages profound reflection in each of us as to how we become who we are once we step outside the shadows of family.

Goal Auzeen Saedi, Ph.D., received her doctorate degree in Clinical Psychology from the University of Notre Dame.

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Educated: A Memoir Hardcover – February 20, 2018

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Print length 352 pages
Language English
Publisher Random House
Publication date February 20, 2018
Dimensions 6.47 x 1.14 x 9.52 inches
ISBN-10 0099511029
ISBN-13 978-0399590504
Lexile measure 870L
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My life has been narrated for me. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong

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ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0399590501
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House; First Edition (February 20, 2018)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0099511029
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0399590504
Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 870L
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.47 x 1.14 x 9.52 inches
#14 in Religious Leader Biographies
#63 in Women's Biographies
#220 in Memoirs (Books)

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About the author

Tara westover.

Tara Westover is an American author living in the UK. Born in Idaho to a father opposed to public education, she never attended school. She spent her days working in her father's junkyard or stewing herbs for her mother, a self-taught herbalist and midwife. She was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom, and after that first taste, she pursued learning for a decade. She graduated magna cum laude from Brigham Young University in 2008 and was subsequently awarded a Gates Cambridge Scholarship. She earned an MPhil from Trinity College, Cambridge in 2009, and in 2010 was a visiting fellow at Harvard University. She returned to Cambridge, where she was awarded a PhD in history in 2014.

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An Utterly Misleading Book About Rural America

White Rural Rage has become a best seller—and kindled an academic controversy.

A black-and-white photo of an American flag held sideways in front of a row of cops facing off against men in tactical vests and MAGA sweatshirts.

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here .

R age is the subject of a new book by the political scientist Tom Schaller and the journalist Paul Waldman. White Rural Rage , specifically. In 255 pages, the authors chart the racism, homophobia, xenophobia, violent predilections, and vulnerability to authoritarianism that they claim make white rural voters a unique “threat to American democracy.” White Rural Rage is a screed lobbed at a familiar target of elite liberal ire. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the authors appeared on Morning Joe , the book inspired an approving column from The New York Times ’ Paul Krugman , and its thesis has been a topic of discussion on podcasts from MSNBC’s Chuck Todd and the right-wing firebrand Charlie Kirk. The book has become a New York Times best seller.

It has also kindled an academic controversy. In the weeks since its publication, a trio of reviews by political scientists have accused Schaller and Waldman of committing what amounts to academic malpractice , alleging that the authors used shoddy methodologies, misinterpreted data, and distorted studies to substantiate their allegations about white rural Americans. I spoke with more than 20 scholars in the tight-knit rural-studies community, most of them cited in White Rural Rage or thanked in the acknowledgments, and they left me convinced that the book is poorly researched and intellectually dishonest.

White Rural Rage illustrates how willing many members of the U.S. media and the public are to believe, and ultimately launder, abusive accusations against an economically disadvantaged group of people that would provoke sympathy if its members had different skin color and voting habits. That this book was able to make it to print—and onto the best-seller list—before anyone noticed that it has significant errors is a testament to how little powerful people think of white rural Americans. As someone who is from the kind of place the authors demonize—a place that is “rural” in the pejorative, rather than literal, sense—I find White Rural Rage personally offensive. I was so frustrated by its indulgence of familiar stereotypes that I aired several intemperate critiques of the book and its authors on social media. But when I dug deeper, I found that the problems with White Rural Rage extend beyond its anti-rural prejudice. As an academic and a writer, I find Schaller and Waldman’s misuse of other scholars’ research indefensible.

After fact-checking many of the book’s claims and citations, I found a pattern: Most of the problems occur in sections of the book that try to prove that white rural Americans are especially likely to commit or express support for political violence. By bending the facts to fit their chosen scapegoat, Schaller and Waldman not only trade on long-standing stereotypes about dangerous rural people. They mislead the public about the all-too-real threats to our democracy today. As serious scholarship has shown—including some of the very scholarship Schaller and Waldman cite, only to contort it—the right-wing rage we need to worry about is not coming from deep-red rural areas. It is coming from cities and suburbs.

T he most obvious problem with White Rural Rage is its refusal to define rural . In a note in the back of the book, the authors write, “What constitutes ‘rural’ and who qualifies as a rural American … depends on who you ask.” Fair enough. The rural-studies scholars I spoke with agreed that there are a variety of competing definitions. But rather than tell us what definition they used, Schaller and Waldman confess that they settled on no definition at all : “We remained agnostic throughout our research and writing by merely reporting the categories and definitions that each pollster, scholar, or researcher used.” In other words, they relied on studies that used different definitions of rural , a decision that conveniently lets them pick and choose whatever research fits their narrative. This is what the scholars I interviewed objected to—they emphasized that the existence of multiple definitions of rural is not an excuse to decline to pick one. “This book amounts to a poor amalgamation of disparate literatures designed to fit a preordained narrative,” Cameron Wimpy, a political scientist at Arkansas State University, told me. It would be like undertaking a book-length study demonizing Irish people, refusing to define what you mean by Irish , and then drawing on studies of native Irish in Ireland, non-Irish immigrants to Ireland, Irish Americans, people who took a 23andMe DNA test that showed Irish ancestry, and Bostonians who get drunk on Saint Patrick’s Day to build your argument about the singular danger of “the Irish.” It’s preposterous.

Adam Harris: The education deserts of rural America

The authors write that they were “at the mercy of the choices made by the researchers who collected, sorted, classified, and tabulated their results.” But reading between the lines, the authors’ working definition of rural often seems to be “a not-so-nice place where white people live,” irrespective of whether that place is a tiny hamlet or a small city. Some of the most jaw-dropping instances of this come when the authors discuss what they would have you believe is rural America’s bigoted assault on local libraries. “The American Library Association tracked 1,269 efforts to ban books in libraries in 2022,” Schaller and Waldman note. “Many of these efforts occurred in rural areas, where libraries have become a target of controversy over books with LGBTQ+ themes or discussions of racism.” The authors detail attacks on a number of libraries: in Llano, Texas; Ashtabula County, Ohio; Craighead County, Arkansas; Maury County, Tennessee; Boundary County, Idaho; and Jamestown, Michigan.

But half of these locations—Craighead County, Maury County, and Jamestown—do not seem to qualify as rural. What the authors call “rural Jamestown, Michigan ,” scores a 1 out of 10 on one of the most popular metrics, the RUCA , used to measure rurality (1 being most urban), and is a quick commute away from the city of Grand Rapids.

That Schaller and Waldman so artfully dodged defining what they mean by rural is a shame for a host of reasons, not the least of which is that the question of who is rural is complex and fascinating. Scholars in rural studies make a distinction between subjective rural identity and objective rural residence—in other words, seeing yourself as rural versus living in a place that is geographically rural according to metrics like RUCA. The thing is, rural identity and rural residence are very, very different. Though Schaller and Waldman mention this distinction briefly in their authors’ note, they do not meaningfully explore it. One political scientist I spoke with, Utah Valley University’s Zoe Nemerever, recently co-authored a paper comparing rural self-identification to residence and found a stunning result: “A minority of respondents who described their neighborhood as rural actually live in an area considered rural.” Her study found that 72 percent of people—at minimum—who saw themselves as living in a rural place did not live in a rural place at all.

It turns out I am one of those people. I grew up in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, an 88 percent white enclave in the southward center of the state. Eighteen minutes and nine miles to the east, you hit the capital city of Harrisburg, which has the best used bookstore in the tristate area. Nineteen minutes and 13 miles away to the west, you hit the game lands, where I spent my teenage years playing hooky and hunting in thick, hard-green mountains. Mechanicsburg feels urban, suburban, and rural all at once. There are strip malls and car dealerships. There are trailer parks and farms with beat-to-hell farmhouses. There are nice suburban neighborhoods with McMansions. My high school had a Future Farmers of America chapter and gave us the first day of deer season off. The final week of my senior year, a kid unballed his fist in the parking lot to show me a bag of heroin. Another wore bow ties and ended up at Harvard.

What do you call a place like that? It was both nice and not-nice. Somewhere and nowhere. Once in college, a professor made a wry joke: Describing a fictional town in a story, he quipped, “It’s the kind of place you see a sign for on the highway, but no one is actually from there.” He paused, racking his brain for an example. “Like Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania.”

I tend to think of myself as having a comparatively “rural” identity for a variety of reasons: because Mechanicsburg was more rural when I was growing up. Because both sides of my family are from deeply rural places: Mathias, West Virginia (where 100 percent of the county population is rural), and Huntingdon, Pennsylvania (74 percent rural). Because, since the age of 10, I have spent nearly all my free time hunting or fishing, mostly in unambiguously rural areas that are a short drive from where I live. Because people like that professor tend to view my hometown as a place that is so irrelevant, it barely exists. So when Nemerever looked up data on Mechanicsburg and told me it had a RUCA score of 1 and was considered metropolitan—like Schaller and Waldman’s erroneous library examples—I was genuinely surprised. I’d made the same mistake about my own hometown that Schaller and Waldman had about Jamestown, Michigan.

Scholars who study rural identity say that common misperceptions like this are why defining rural is so important. “Researchers should be highly conscious of what ‘rural’ means when they want to measure relevant social, psychological, and political correlates,” a study of “non-rural rural identifiers” by Kristin Lunz Trujillo, a political-science professor at the University of South Carolina, warns. “Rurality can be a social identity that includes a broad group categorization, even including people who do not currently live in a rural area.”

Schaller and Waldman might have understood these nuances—and not repeatedly misidentified rural areas—if they’d meaningfully consulted members of the rural-studies community. In a portion of their acknowledgments section, the authors thank researchers and journalists in the field who “directed our attention to findings of relevance for our inquiry.” I contacted all 10 of these people, hoping to better understand what kind of input Schaller and Waldman sought from subject-matter experts. One said he was satisfied with the way his work had been acknowledged, and another did not respond to my message. Seven reported only a few cursory email exchanges with the authors about the subject of the book and were surprised to find that they had been thanked at all.

Although it is not unusual for authors to thank people they do not know or corresponded with only briefly, it is quite telling that not a single person I spoke with in rural studies—with the exception of the Wilmington College rural historian Keith Orejel, who said he was disappointed that his feedback did not seem to influence the book—said these men sought out their expertise in a serious way, circulated drafts of the book, or simply ran its controversial argument by them in detail.

T he more significant problem with White Rural Rage is its analysis of the threat of political violence. A core claim of the book is that rural Americans are disproportionately likely to support or potentially commit violence that threatens American democracy. “Violent or not, anti-democratic sentiments and behaviors come in many forms and emerge from all over the nation,” Schaller and Waldman claim. “But rural Whites pose a unique threat.” The sections where the authors attempt to defend this assertion, however, contain glaring mistakes.

Schaller and Waldman describe the supposed threat to democracy posed by “constitutional sheriffs”—members of a right-wing sheriffs organization —in rural counties. But the authors offer no proof that these sheriffs are more likely to work in rural places. They cite an article about “rogue sheriffs elected in rural counties” that is not about rural sheriffs. And, in what Nemerever described to me as “an egregious misrepresentation and professional malpractice,” Schaller and Waldman cite two articles about “constitutional sheriffs” that do not contain the words constitutional sheriff . Schaller and Waldman also share an anecdote about the antidemocratic adventures of “the sheriff of rural Johnson County, Kansas” as proof of the organization’s dangerous influence. They neglect to mention that Johnson County is thoroughly metropolitan and a short drive from Kansas City. Per the 2020 census, it is not simply Kansas’s most populous county; it is the least rural county in the entire state and one of the least rural in the entire country. It also flipped to Joe Biden in 2020 after Trump won it in 2016. (Schaller and Waldman acknowledged this mistake in an email to The Atlantic ; they said they had looked up the information for Johnson County, Arkansas, which is rural. They said they will correct the error in future editions of the book.)

Antonia Hitchens: Like Uber, but for militias

The authors cite an article titled “The Rise of Political Violence in the United States” to support their claim that the threat of political violence is particularly acute in rural America. However, that article directly contradicts that claim. “Political violence in the United States has been greatest in suburbs where Asian American and Hispanic American immigration has been growing fastest, particularly in heavily Democratic metropoles surrounded by Republican-dominated rural areas,” the author, Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, notes. “These areas, where white flight from the 1960s is meeting demographic change, are areas of social contestation. They are also politically contested swing districts.” Schaller and Waller claim, too, that “rural residents are more likely to favor violence over democratic deliberation to solve political disputes,” but the article they cite as evidence discusses neither political violence nor democratic deliberation.

This pattern continues when the authors rattle off a list of violent extremists—including the Pizzagate gunman and a pair of men who plotted to capture Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer—implying that these instances are proof of the unique dangers of “rural” people. But these men are not rural. They’re all from metropolitan areas with RUCA scores of 1 or 2, situated in counties that are also metropolitan. Time and time again, Schaller and Waldman warp the evidence to deflect blame away from metro areas, onto rural ones.

Nowhere is this shifting of blame more apparent than in Schaller and Waldman’s assertion that rural Americans “are overrepresented among those with insurrectionist tendencies.” As one review of the book notes, Schaller and Waldman marshal a report by the political scientist Robert Pape as evidence of this claim. But they completely misunderstand the point of Pape’s study. When I contacted Pape to ask whether he thought that his research had been misused, he was unequivocal.

He directed me to the slide in his report cited by Schaller and Waldman to back up their claims. Schaller and Waldman rely on the slide to point out, correctly, that 27 percent of Americans with insurrectionist views are rural and that these views are slightly overrepresented among rural people. However, they ignore what Pape explicitly described, in big bold letters, as the report’s “#1 key finding”: that there are approximately 21 million potential insurrectionists in the United States—people who believe both that the 2020 election was stolen and that restoring Trump to the presidency by force is justified—and they are “mainly urban.” The authors fail to explain why we should be more worried about the 5.67 million hypothetical rural insurrectionists than the 15.33 million who live in urban and suburban areas, have more resources, made up the bulk of January 6 participants, and are the primary danger, according to Pape’s report.

“They are giving the strong impression that our study is supporting their conclusion, when this is false,” Pape told me. He added that this isn’t a matter of subjective interpretation. The political scientist stretched his arms so that his right and left hands were in opposite corners of the Zoom screen: “Here is their argument. Here is their data. And there’s a gulf in between.”

Pape told me that he had been worried about this book from the moment he saw the authors discussing it on Morning Joe and describing what they call “the fourfold, interconnected threat that white rural voters pose to the country.” “This is a tragedy for the country,” Pape said, “because they’re grossly underestimating the threat to our democracy.” He went on to say that “the real tragedy would be if the DHS, the FBI, political leaders took this book seriously,” because law enforcement and government officials would be focusing their limited resources on the wrong areas. Even as Schaller and Waldman accuse the media of not paying enough attention to the antidemocratic dangers of the far right, the authors are the ones who are not taking this threat seriously. By shining a spotlight on a small part of the insurrectionist movement, White Rural Rage risks distracting the public from the bigger dangers.

A rlie Hochschild , a celebrated sociologist and the author of Strangers in Their Own Land and a forthcoming book on Appalachia, struck a plaintive note in an email to me about White Rural Rage : “When I think of those I’ve come to know in Pike County, Kentucky—part of the nation’s whitest and second poorest congressional district—I imagine that many would not see themselves in this portrait.” She added that these Kentuckians would no doubt “feel stereotyped by books that talk of ‘rural white rage,’ by people who otherwise claim to honor ‘diversity.’”

Kathy Cramer, author of The Politics of Resentment , a key work in the field that is cited by Schaller and Waldman, told me simply: “The question of our time is not who are the bad Americans, but what is wrong with our systems—our government, our economy, our modes of communication—that means that so many people feel unseen, unheard, and disrespected by the people in charge? And what can we do, constructively, about that?” It is a good question. The authors of White Rural Rage might have written a fine book had they taken it seriously.

“The scholars who have criticized us aren’t bothered by our methods; they’re disturbed by our message,” Schaller and Waldman wrote in a statement to The Atlantic . “One of our critics, Kristin Lunz Trujillo, said in response to our book, ‘we need to be careful as scholars to not stereotype or condescend to white rural America in a way that erodes trust and widens divisions.’ Though we would insist in the strongest possible terms that we engage in neither stereotyping nor condescension, we nevertheless find that a revealing comment: Rather than a statement about what the facts are or the scholarship reveals, it’s a declaration of a political and professional agenda.”

Schaller and Waldman also took issue with my criticism of the book on social media and in this article. “Like many of our critics,” they wrote, I “would apparently rather apologize for the revanchist attitudes among many white rural Americans than speak honestly about the serious threats facing our secular, pluralist, constitutional democracy.”

This book will only further erode American confidence in the media and academia at a moment when faith in these institutions is already at an all-time low . And it will likely pour gasoline on rural Americans’ smoldering resentment, a resentment that is in no small part driven by the conviction that liberal elites both misunderstand and despise them. White Rural Rage provides a rather substantial piece of evidence to that score, and shows that rural folks’ suspicions are anything but “fake news.” However, this is only part of the story. And it is not the most important part.

Schaller and Waldman are right: There are real threats to American democracy, and we should be worried about political violence. But by erroneously pinning the blame on white rural Americans, they’ve distracted the public from the real danger. The threat we must contend with today is not white rural rage, but white urban and suburban rage .

Instead of reckoning with the ugly fact that a threat to our democracy is emerging from right-wing extremists in suburban and urban areas, the authors of White Rural Rage contorted studies and called unambiguously metro areas “rural” so that they could tell an all-too-familiar story about scary hillbillies. Perhaps this was easier than confronting the truth: that the call is coming from inside the house. It is not primarily the rural poor, but often successful , white metropolitan men who imperil our republic.

Alexandra Fuller’s new book is not your typical grief memoir

‘fi,’ written in the aftermath of her son’s sudden death at 21, is terrifying, profound and defiantly enthralling.

In one of the best-loved memoirs of the early aughts, “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight,” Alexandra Fuller wrote of her childhood in Africa during the tumultuous 1970s and ’80s. The author, who was born in England, spent much of her youth in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and her childhood was marked by adventure and tragedy, including three dead siblings.

Who could have imagined that in the two decades since, life would give her material for three more grief memoirs, written in the spaces between a novel and several other nonfiction books. In “Leaving Before the Rains Come” (2016), she documented the painful end of her long marriage ; in “Travel Light, Move Fast” (2019), the passing of her beloved, complicated father. Then, in that book’s epilogue, she revealed that as bad as things may have seemed, they were now much worse: Her sister and mother had stopped speaking to her, the romance that saved the day post-divorce was over, and, dwarfing every other possible misery, her 21-year-old son had died.

She returns to these difficult topics in “ Fi: A Memoir ,” a book that is as hard to pick up as it is to put down — a gutting, terrifying, profound and defiantly enthralling read. Toward the end of the memoir, Fuller quotes Franz Kafka: “A book must be an axe to the frozen sea inside us.” This book is a sharp ax. By its end, I was moved and devastated yet somehow strengthened.

Fi was the nickname her son, Charles Fuller Ross, chose for himself. He was as lively and dear and beloved in their small “Wydaho” community as a boy can be. His death in 2018 was almost completely out of left field. “Three days ago, I’d walked with him along the Snake River — distracted,” Fuller writes. “He’d been home only a few days from Argentina, where he’d had the first inexplicable seizure at the end of his semester abroad — stress of finals, late nights studying, packing up to come home.” Then he had another seizure, and a week later, he died. That is all Fuller knows about it — she did not care to read the autopsy report or join the meeting his father had with the doctors and the medical examiner.

“It’s not only that I didn’t want to know the details of what the experts could only speculate had been the cause of Fi’s seizures and therefore the cause of his death; it’s mostly that I didn’t have time for guesses. I wanted to know for certain: where, now, is my only begotten, beloved son?”

Where he is, now, is in this book she has written — and also, incidentally, in a lovely series of articles in the online journal Medium by his sister Sarah Ross. The biggest challenge and also the saving grace of the period after Fi’s death was the fact that Fuller has two other children, who still very much needed a functioning mother. Sarah, then 24, and Cecily, then 13, were extraordinarily close to their brother, which had been partly their mother’s doing and also her joy. “Because of the rupture from my siblings, the lifetime of pain it’d been, I’d soldered my children to one another.”

Fuller came to this responsibility prepared, having been mothered herself by a woman scalded by the loss of two infants and a toddler who drowned. “Everyone has always said that my mother’s bouts of blackout drinking, her suicide attempts, her periods of insanity make sense. People have always told me that I should understand this; when a mother loses a child, her surviving children lose a mother. But I didn’t lose my mother; she hung on, mothering away, dragging and coaxing and encouraging us when she could, how she could; ignoring us and poisoning herself when she couldn’t. I didn’t lose a mother when she lost my siblings; that was my mother, marinated in grief but also tough, glamorous, heartbroken, capable, creative, resilient, determined to have a ball anyway.”

For reasons that are not discussed in the book but may have something to do with Fuller’s memoirs, her mother is completely absent from her life now. To have to go through this tragedy without the support of close family adds bitterness to the flavor profile of Fuller’s pain, and it’s particularly confounding to read that her ex-husband, Charlie, flew over to spend time with her mother and sister in Africa. Fortunately, Fuller does have one ferociously committed ally, a woman named Till, a younger ex-lover who — though Fuller rejects her, refuses to sleep with her or even talk to her (she communicates with flash cards), and generally treats her like an incompetent servant — refuses to let her be totally alone. Till moves with her to the middle of nowhere, staying down the road because she’s not allowed in the “sheepwagon” Fuller inhabits herself. Till drives Fuller to a grueling-sounding silent retreat in a former mental institution in Canada. She feeds her, waters her, stands between her and self-harm. She is certainly the hero of this book.

There are plenty of non-heroes, as well. As usual, in times of tragedy, people say the darndest things, and Fuller has not forgotten them: “‘You will never get over it,’ a woman of my acquaintance assured me quite casually, as if pointing out to someone pinned under a bulldozer: Oh, that won’t budge in this lifetime .” Fuller’s reply, “thank you,” hid her real thoughts: “I’m not ready to eschew my pain, wrap myself in prayer flags, and fade out with the bells. I am merely in the early learning stages of grieving my only possible son.”

As Fuller reminds us, she is far from alone, but “one of millions of mothers to have lost a child every year.” Then she asks: “If none of us suffered, where would we be? Without wise women is where; suffering brings wisdom. So, a gift, this suffering, a promissory note for sagacity.” With “Fi,” I would call the note paid in full, though — Fuller being Fuller — I won’t be surprised if there are future installments.

Marion Winik, host of the NPR podcast “The Weekly Reader,” is the author of numerous books, including “First Comes Love” and “The Big Book of the Dead.”

By Alexandra Fuller

Grove. 272 pp. $28

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The Culture Warriors Are Coming for You Smart People

In Lionel Shriver’s new novel, judging intelligence and competence is a form of bigotry.

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An illustration of many hands surrounding a thought bubble. Some are poking it with needles while others are throwing items at it.

By Laura Miller

Laura Miller is a books and culture columnist for Slate and the author of “The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia.”

MANIA , by Lionel Shriver

As a novelist, Lionel Shriver has made her strongest impressions selecting some hot issue of the day — school shootings, the American health care system, the ballooning of the U.S. national debt — and working it into a well-paced drama about its effects on one family. When this formula works, as it did best with “We Need to Talk About Kevin” (2003), the result can be riveting and also very popular. The intimacy of domestic politics moderates Shriver’s polemical side, which, when given free rein — as during an infamous 2016 speech she gave on cultural appropriation while wearing a sombrero — usually turns out to be smug, crude and obtuse.

In Shriver’s tiresome new novel, “Mania ,” the balance is off. “Mania” is the story of Pearson Converse, an untenured academic who lives with her tree-surgeon partner and three children in a Pennsylvania college town. Most of the novel takes place during an alternate version of the 2010s, when a social-justice fad has been ignited by a best-selling book titled “The Calumny of I.Q.: Why Discrimination Against ‘Dumb People’ Is the Last Great Civil Rights Fight.”

Pearson’s son gets sent home from school for using “the D-word,” now considered a slur. Lawn signs appear in the neighborhood announcing “We support cognitive neutrality.” Student “predators” haunt the literature course Pearson teaches at the local liberal arts college, hungrily searching for any slip-up suggesting that she thinks some people are smarter than others, so they can report her to the administration and get her sacked. Worst of all, Pearson’s best friend from girlhood, Emory Ruth, boosts her TV career by taping editorials endorsing the new ideology known as Mental Parity.

In real life, partisan rancor typically fuels culture-war initiatives like this; in Shriver’s imaginary America, it barely exists. The new ethos gets rapidly and improbably adopted by everybody in every walk of life, regardless of political affiliation. Mental Parity not only borrows from the left’s obsession with egalitarianism, safetyism and language hygiene but also draws on the right’s mistrust of expertise and credentialism; it could have bipartisan appeal if it weren’t so patently absurd.

Soon, Barack Obama is out of favor for being “outstandingly astute, eloquent and well informed,” and replaced by Joe Biden, who makes a point of installing a Treasury secretary who’s “not only an imbecile but an imbecile who was recognizably an imbecile — someone whose speech and affect were conspicuously vacuous.” Similar incompetents are ordered to take out Osama bin Laden, a failed mission that leaves him free to bomb the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum.

Pearson’s partner, Wade, is forced to hire an assistant who knows nothing about arboriculture and drops a branch on him. Because medical degrees are “now handed out as carelessly as shopping fliers,” a young surgeon botches the ankle surgery his injuries require. Then Wade nearly dies after untrained nurses administer the wrong medication and is saved only by a doctor in his 50s, a relic from the good old days who has the temerity to know what he’s doing.

It goes on and on. Cars blow up because they’re built by idiots. Shrewd consumers import their food from overseas to avoid poisoning from unsafe American goods. Any word or phrase ever used as a synonym for “intelligent” (“quick,” “deep”) or stupid (“meatball,” “simple,” “dense”) must be purged from daily usage even when denoting a different meaning. If you want to order a wooden board at a hardware store, you have to ask for one that’s “two inches fat.” Mensa is “the kind of cerebral-supremacist organization” deemed “the greatest threat to American civic order” by no less than the F.B.I. Most fantastically, a child protective services investigator arrives at Pearson’s home because her youngest child reported her mother describing her as less intelligent than her siblings. “Use of language of such a derogatory character with minors,” this pious emissary states, “is classified as child abuse” and “potentially grounds for removing a child to foster care.”

As parody goes, this is ham-fisted stuff. Ironically, “Mania” lacks the discernment required to make it work. Satire demands precision, and Shriver applies an ax to a job calling for a scalpel. Although Shriver has made writing unlikable protagonists into a sort of cottage industry, Pearson is something more, a preeningly self-righteous didact swathed in false modesty about her own supposedly mediocre brain. Like many of Shriver’s narrators, Pearson often speaks or narrates with the sort of affected, antiquated vocabulary of a stock character from a 1930s movie, the portly gentleman in a white three-piece suit, up to no good and puffing on a cigar, played by Sidney Greenstreet. She has an odd, unexplained penchant for alliteration: “At the antediluvian argot, I nearly dropped my mask of stony stoicism.” She is not so much unlikable as simply insufferable.

Pearson’s past as an apostate of the Jehovah’s Witnesses makes her the sworn enemy of cant, and the only language she speaks is invective, so inevitably, she runs ruinously afoul of the new dispensation. Meanwhile, Emory’s star rises. She proves herself the ideal apparatchik on camera while privately snickering with Pearson and Wade over the silliness of Mental Parity, at least at first. The most — really the only — intriguing aspect of the novel is the relationship between these two friends and Pearson’s growing realization that Emory lacks a moral center. Emory herself remains a cipher. Is she a sociopath? Or just an opportunist? If only she were the unlikable narrator to tell this story. That would constitute a stretch for Shriver, imagining the interiority of a character who’s not basically an avatar of herself. That would be a truly daring choice, and dare I say it, a smart one.

MANIA | By Lionel Shriver | Harper | 277 pp. | $30

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Educated by Tara Westover
Ultimately, Educated is a rewarding odyssey you do not want to miss. Review first posted - 3/23/18 Published - 2/20/18 November 29, 2018 - Educated is named as one of The 10 Best Books of 2018 December 2019 - Educated is named winner of the 2018 Goodreads Choice Award for memoirs, beating out Michelle Obamas's blockbuster hit, Becoming.
Review: 'Educated,' by Tara Westover
EDUCATED A Memoir By Tara Westover 335 pp. Random House. $28. ... Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review's podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world.
Educated by Tara Westover review
Educated is published by Hutchinson. To order a copy for £12.74 (RRP £14.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only.
Educated by Tara Westover: Summary and reviews
Book Summary. Winner of the 2018 BookBrowse Nonfiction Award. An unforgettable memoir about a young girl who, kept out of school, leaves her survivalist family and goes on to earn a PhD from Cambridge University. Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared ...
"Educated," by Tara Westover
Alexandra Schwartz reviews "Educated," a memoir by Tara Westover, about her decision to leave home and get a formal education, which amounted to a rebellion against her Mormon parents ...
Book review Educated Tara Westover
0:04. 1:00. Tara Westover is living proof that some people are flat-out, boots-always-laced-up indomitable. Her new book, Educated (Random House, 334 pp., ★★★★ out of four), is a ...
EDUCATED
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance. 28. Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006.
Review: Tara Westover's 'Educated: A Memoir'
Tara Westover's one-of-a-kind memoir is about the shaping of a mind, yet page after page describes the maiming of bodies—not just hers, but the heads, limbs, and torsos of her parents and six ...
Spinning a Brutal Off-the-Grid Childhood into a Gripping Memoir
"Learning in our family was entirely self-directed," she writes in her memoir, "Educated," which enters the hardcover nonfiction list at No. 3. "You could learn anything you could teach ...
Educated by Tara Westover review: An extraordinary Mormon upbringing
Educated by Tara Westover review: An extraordinary Mormon upbringing recounted with evocative lyricism Tara Westover hadn't heard about the Holocaust, WWII or Martin Luther King until university
Book Review: Educated by Tara Westover
Book Review: Educated by Tara Westover. Educated is a memoir of the growing up of Tara Westover. The book is split into three parts: growing up and her childhood; College, predominantly at BYU; and, further education and the cracking of familial relationships. This book, I found, was largely an exploration of her familial relationships and the ...
Family's Response: Educated by Tara Westover
Tara Westover's Family and Responses to Educated (Update 8/2020: LaRee Westover — "Faye" in the book, the mother of Tara Westover, has written a book called "Educating" that's partially a response to Educated.She's crowdfunding it on Indiegogo.. I went through a lot of the comments that her family has made publicly (on Facebook, Amazon, and Goodreads, etc.) about the book, and ...
Review: Educated by Tara Westover
Educated is a raw, emotional, and at times, heartbreaking account of Tara Westover's life. Tara endured both physical and verbal abuse at the hands of family members and saw her education, as well as her overall wellbeing, neglected by her parents. Throughout the book, she strives to deliver an unbiased account of events, going so far as to ...
Educated is even better than you've heard
Book Reviews. About Bill Gates. Account Deactivation. Click the link below to begin the account deactivation process. ... (Full disclosure: she was a Gates Scholar, which I didn't even know until I reached that part of the book.) Educated is an amazing story, and I get why it's spent so much time on the top of the New York Times bestseller ...
Educated: A Memoir
Educated: A Memoir. by Tara Westover. Publication Date: February 8, 2022. Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction. Paperback: 368 pages. Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks. ISBN-10: 0399590528. ISBN-13: 9780399590528. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, Tara Westover was 17 the first time she set foot in a classroom.
Educated by Tara Westover
Book Review: Educated by Tara Westover. Educated by Tara Westover is an anguished story about growing up in the mountains of Idaho in a fundamentalist Mormon/survivalist family led by a father convinced that the socialist government in every respect was evil.
Amazon.com: Customer reviews: Educated: A Memoir
As Tara strives for self-improvement through education, the book also exposes the challenges she faces when confronting her family's beliefs and her own internalized guilt and doubt. The memoir highlights the inherent tension between Tara's desire for knowledge and her loyalty to her family and upbringing. This internal struggle is a central ...
Educated Book Review, a Memoir by Tara Westover
EDUCATED BOOK REVIEW - RATING. As I was reading the memoir I thought I was going to rate it a 4. However, I became increasingly invested in Tara's coming-of-age story, giving it a 5 out of 5 stars on Goodreads. If you enjoyed Wild or Angela's Ashes, and enjoy narratives of misery and triumph, I recommend reading Educated by Tara Westover.
Educated (book)
Educated is a 2018 memoir by the American author Tara Westover.Westover recounts overcoming her survivalist Mormon family in order to go to college, and emphasizes the importance of education in enlarging her world. She details her journey from her isolated life in the mountains of Idaho to completing a PhD program in history at Cambridge University. ...
A Psychologist's Take on Tara Westover's Memoir, Educated
As I combed through Amazon reviews of Educated, I was struck by the controversy as well.Although there has been overwhelming support for the book, there have also been accusations of more fiction ...
Book review: Educated by Tara Westover
In a nutshell, Tara's story is about escaping from constrictive, predefined belief systems to achieve liberation. However, the path to education is treacherous, gut-wrenching, and filled with uncertainty. She writes, " My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute.
Educated: A Memoir: Westover, Tara: 9780399590504: Amazon.com: Books
Tara Westover is an American historian and memoirist. Her first book, Educated, debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and remained on the list, in hardcover, for more than two years. The book, a memoir of her upbringing in rural Idaho, was a finalist for a number of national awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and the National Book ...
Book Review: Tara Westover's 'Educated' Shares Too Much, Too Soon
When Memoirs Share Too Much, Too Soon. Tara Westover's Educated hides a deep and unsettling point. T elling someone you were raised by survivalists in the middle of rural Idaho is an excellent ...
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Educated by Tara Westover review – escape from a Mormon fundamentalist family

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Educated by Tara Westover review: An extraordinary Mormon upbringing recounted with evocative lyricism

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A Psychologist's Take on Tara Westover's Memoir, Educated

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Educated: Overcoming Adversity and Finding One's Own Path