book review for educated

“Educated,” by Tara Westover

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.

Tara Westover

352 pages, Hardcover

First published February 20, 2018

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On the highway below, the school bus rolls past without stopping. I am only 7, but I understand that it is this fact more than any other that makes my family different. We don't go to school. Dad worries that the government will force us to go, but it can't because it doesn't know about us. 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.

We had a farm which belonged to my grandfather, and we had a salvage yard full of crumpled-up cars which belonged to my father. And my mother was a - she was an herbalist and a midwife. And as children, we spent a lot of hours walking on the mountain, gathering rose hips and mullein flowers that she could stew into tinctures. So in a lot of ways, it was a very beautiful childhood. - from NPR interview

…he just didn't have that bone in his head that said, this is dangerous; don't do this. And he had a really hard time understanding injuries even after they had happened and how severe they were. I just - I don't know what it was about the way his mind worked. He just wasn't able to do that. - from NPR interview

…there was not a lot of school taking place. We had books, and occasionally we would be kind of sent to read them. But for example, I was the youngest child, and I never took an exam, or I never wrote an essay for my mother that she read or nothing like kind of getting everyone together and having anything like a lecture. So it was a lot more kind of if you wanted to read a book, you could, but you certainly weren't going to be made to do that. - from NPR interview

All abuse, no matter what kind of abuse it is, foremost, an assault on the mind. Because if you’re going to abuse someone I think you have to invade their reality, in order to distort it, and you have to convince them of two things. You have to convince them that what you’re doing isn’t that bad. Which means you have to normalize it. You have to justify it, rationalize it. And the other thing you have to convince them of is that they deserve it. - from C-span interview

Goodreads: Congratulations on your win! What does the award and all the support from Goodreads readers mean to you? Tara Westover : I’m really, really excited about it. It’s great when the highbrow powers that be, the literary giants, say, "Oh, you wrote a good book," but it does mean something extra when it’s readers, when it’s people interacting with the book in a personal way, not just because they like the language or not because they think it’s doing something bold with the form, but because they had an experience with it. That means something a little bit different and a little bit extra. A readers’ award is a really exciting one.

“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.”

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.

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

Curiosity is a luxury for the financially secure.

“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.”

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Review: ‘Educated,’ by Tara Westover

By Alec MacGillis

• March 1, 2018
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(This book was selected as one of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2018. For the rest of the list, click here .)

EDUCATED A Memoir By Tara Westover 335 pp. Random House. $28.

America has struggled with the urban-rural divide for centuries, stretching all the way back to when Manhattan’s own Alexander Hamilton fixed his sights on backwoods whiskey distilleries as a revenue source for the new Republic, prompting rebellion. But one could make the case that the divide has never consumed us as much as it does today. The political parties are aligned more than ever around blue metropolises and red spaces in between. Economic growth is now so glaringly concentrated in certain urban areas that it has reignited the age-old debate over staying vs. going. Should the young and ambitious from struggling small towns and cities be encouraged to seek their fortune in the hotbeds of dynamism and overpriced Sunday brunch, or does this only sunder family ties and hasten the collapse of the interior?

It was this dilemma that helped make J. D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” a runaway best seller in 2016 — the tale of a young man who’d overcome the dysfunctions of his transplanted Appalachian family to ascend to the Ivy League and Silicon Valley, with plenty of culture shocks along the way. Yet Tara Westover’s new tale of escape, “Educated,” makes Vance’s seem tame by comparison. Where Vance wrote affectingly of showing up at Ohio State and Yale Law with the limited preparation provided by his middling schools in Middletown, Ohio, Westover describes showing up in college with no schooling at all. Where Vance describes a family contending with the all-too-common burdens of substance abuse, Westover lays bare a family cursed by ideological mania and outlandish physical trauma. If Vance’s memoir offered street-heroin-grade drama, Westover’s is carfentanil, the stuff that tranquilizes elephants.

The extremity of Westover’s upbringing emerges gradually through her telling, which only makes the telling more alluring and harrowing. The basics are these: Now in her early 30s, she was the youngest of seven in a survivalist family in the shadow of a mountain in a Mormon pocket of southeastern Idaho. Her father, Gene (a pseudonym), grew up on a farm at the base of the mountain, the son of a hot-tempered father, and moved up the slope with his wife, the product of a more genteel upbringing in the nearby small town. Gene sustained his growing family by building barns and hay sheds and by scrapping metal in his junkyard; his wife, Faye (also a pseudonym), chipped in with her income from mixing up herbal remedies and from her reluctant work as an unlicensed midwife’s assistant and then midwife.

During his 20s, Gene’s edgy and not uncharismatic intensity morphed into politically charged paranoia, fueled by what the reader is led to presume is a severe case of bipolar disorder. Around the age of 30, he pulled his eldest children from school to protect them from the Illuminati, though they, at least, had the benefit of a birth certificate, an indulgence the youngest four would be denied. In theory, the children were being home-schooled; in reality, there was virtually no academic instruction to speak of. They learned to read from the Bible, the Book of Mormon and the speeches of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. The only science book in the house was for young children, full of glossy illustrations. The bulk of their time was spent helping their parents at work. Barely into her teens, Westover graduated from helping her mom mix remedies and birth babies to sorting scrap with her dad, who had the unnerving habit of inadvertently hitting her with pieces he’d tossed.

Getting hit with a steel cylinder square in the gut was the least of the risks in the Westover household. The book is, among other things, a catalog of job-site horrors: fingers lost, legs gashed, bodies horribly burned. No pointy-headed bureaucrat could make a stronger case for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration than do the unregulated Westovers with their many calamities. Making matters worse is Gene’s refusal to allow any of the injured and wounded (himself included) to seek medical attention beyond his wife’s tinctures — “God’s pharmacy” — a refusal that also greatly exacerbates the effects of two terrible car accidents. “God and his angels are here, working right alongside us,” he tells Westover. “They won’t let you get hurt.” When she gets tonsillitis, he tells her to stand outside with her mouth open so that the sun can work its magic. She does, for a month.

As time goes on, the conflict between father and daughter gathers as inevitably as the lengthening fall shadows from Buck’s Peak above. Gene’s fervor and paranoia are undiminished by the failure of the world to end at Y2K, despite his ample preparations. (Westover offers the pathos-filled image of her father sitting expressionless in front of “The Honeymooners” as the world ticks quietly onward.) Meanwhile, she is starting to test the boundaries of an upbringing more tightly constricted than she can even begin to imagine. Her venture into a local dance class ends with her father condemning the group’s painfully modest performance outfits as whorish. Encouraged by an older brother who started studying covertly and eventually left for college, Westover attempts to do likewise, reading deep into her father’s books on the 19th-century Mormon prophets. “The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand,” she writes with characteristic understatement. (Only very occasionally is Westover’s assured prose marred by unnecessary curlicues.) As if her father’s tyranny is not enough, she must contend also with sadistic physical attacks from a different brother, whose instability was worsened by a 12-foot headfirst plunge onto rebar in yet another Westover workplace accident.

Tara makes her first big step toward liberation by, remarkably, doing well enough on the ACT to gain admission to Brigham Young University. (“It proves one thing at least,” her father says grudgingly. “Our home school is as good as any public education.”) There, she is shocked by the profane habits of her classmates, like the roommate who wears pink plush pajamas with “Juicy” emblazoned on the rear, and in turn shocks her classmates with her ignorance, never more so than when she asks blithely in art history class what the Holocaust was. (Other new discoveries for her: Napoleon, Martin Luther King Jr., the fact that Europe is not a country.) Such excruciating moments do not keep professors from recognizing her talent and voracious hunger to learn; soon enough, she’s off to a fellowship at Cambridge University, where a renowned professor — a Holocaust expert, no less — can’t help exclaiming when he meets her: “How marvelous. It’s as if I’ve stepped into Shaw’s ‘Pygmalion.’”

Westover eventually makes it to Harvard for another fellowship and then back to Cambridge to pursue her Ph.D. in history. Even then, she’s not yet fully sprung, so deeply rooted are the tangled familial claims of loyalty, guilt, shame and, yes, love. It is only when the final, wrenching break from most of her family arrives that one realizes just how courageous this testimonial really is. These disclosures will take a toll. But one is also left convinced that the costs are worth it. By the end, Westover has somehow managed not only to capture her unsurpassably exceptional upbringing, but to make her current situation seem not so exceptional at all, and resonant for many others. She is but yet another young person who left home for an education, now views the family she left across an uncomprehending ideological canyon, and isn’t going back.

Alec MacGillis covers government and politics for ProPublica. He is the author of “The Cynic: The Political Education of Mitch McConnell.”

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Summary and Reviews of Educated by Tara Westover

Summary | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Discuss | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio

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• Feb 20, 2018, 352 pages
• Feb 2022, 368 pages

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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 ...

Please be aware that this discussion may contain spoilers!

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Name a book that was really popular that you absolutely hated Educated by Tara Westover. I felt the whole story was embellished to the max! -Cheryl_Winter View Post

What are some books you loved reading in 2024? ...Conklin The Wedding People by Alison Espach The Cliffs by J Courtney Sullivan The Women by Kristen Hannah The Sun is a Compass by Caroline Van Hemert Educated by Tara Westover The Stars Are Fire by Anita Shreve Book Lovers by Emily Henry Funny Story by Emily Henry After I do by Taylor Jenkins Reid The Third Gilmore Girl by... -Debbie_M View Post

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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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(Reviewed by Rebecca Foster ).

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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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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.

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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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“Educated” by Tara Westover: A remarkably candid memoir about growing up survivalist

Posted by Mal Warwick | Memoir , Nonfiction | 0

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If you grew up in a comfortable middle-class home, as I did, you may be shocked by Tara Westover ‘s Educated , an account of her childhood and adolescence in a Mormon survivalist family in Idaho. I was. Again and again, I found my jaw dropping at the cruelty, ignorance, and superstition surrounding her. Yet Westover did far more than survive survivalists. Despite never attending school and receiving virtually no home-schooling, she has secured a PhD in intellectual history and political thought from Cambridge University . And two of her six siblings have PhDs as well. Her memoir, Educated , is an astonishing testament to the power of human potential.

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

A remarkably candid memoir about growing up among survivalists

As memoir, Educated is unusually honest. Westover portrays her father as what I would call a raving lunatic. The man would hold out for hour after hour about the evils of the government, the Illuminati, and the Medical Establishment. On one occasion one of his bad decisions led to a tragic car crash that grievously wounded Tara’s mother. On another, his stubborn refusal to follow simple safety procedures with dangerous machinery nearly killed Tara and one of her brothers. Much later, he caused an explosion that nearly killed him . In fact, she notes that his behavior suggests he is bipolar—and that couldn’t be more obvious from her account.

Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover (2018) 336 pages ★★★★★

Here is what Westover’s father told her one evening about her decision to go to college. “‘The Lord has called me to testify,’ he said. ‘He is displeased. You have cast aside his blessings to whore after man’s knowledge. His wrath is stirred against you. It will not be long in coming.'”

But it’s not just her father who’s nuts. She details one incident after another involving one of her older brothers that make him out to be not just cruel and sadistic but dangerously violent as well.

A long, slow learning curve

Yet Westover is equally candid about her own failings. And her education into the ways of the world came slowly. She was sixteen before she began to learn much from any books other than the Book of Mormon and the Bible. In college at Brigham Young University, it was years before she learned to wash her hands after using the toilet. (“‘I teach them not to piss on their hands,'” her father said.) And even as a graduate student at Cambridge she was still learning how to relate successfully to other people.

Westover remained captive to the faith of her father even in college. “Not knowing for certain, but refusing to give way to those who claim certainty, was a privilege I had never allowed myself,” Westover writes. “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.”

“Learning in our family was entirely self-directed,” she explains. “[Y]ou could learn anything you could teach yourself, after your work was done. Some of us were more disciplined than others. I was one of the least disciplined, so that by the time I was ten, the only subject I had studied systematically was Morse code, because Dad insisted that I learn it.” He had somehow persuaded himself (and his family) that after civilization collapsed, they would be the only people capable of communicating. It wasn’t evident with whom they would communicate.

A powerful attraction to the land

In Educated , Tara Westover makes clear that her experience growing up was by no means all negative. For many years, and presumably to this day, she felt a powerful attraction to the land. “There’s a sense of sovereignty that comes from life on a mountain,” she writes, “a perception of privacy and isolation, even of dominion. In that vast space you can sail unaccompanied for hours, afloat on pine and brush and rock. It’s a tranquillity born of sheer immensity; it calms with its very magnitude, which renders the merely human of no consequence.”

Westover wrote this book at age twenty-nine. She was remarkably young to display such penetrating self-awareness. And her performance as a student both at Brigham Young University and at Cambridge makes clear that she is brilliant. That’s obvious in the book itself. She reveals, too, that she is a gifted singer. (One of the few ways she escaped total immersion in her family as a teenager was as a star in musical productions at a local theater.)

Educated was named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by the New York Times Book Review and one of the best books of the year by many other publications. It is definitely that.

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You’ll find this book on The 40 best books of the decade from 2010-19.

You may also care to take a look at my post, 14 excellent memoirs .  Top 10 nonfiction books about politics  and  10 enlightening books about poverty in America  might also be of interest.

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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

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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SEEN & HEARD

PERSPECTIVES

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

From mean streets to wall street.

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

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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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Winter 2024 Appeal - Keep the Fuse lit!

Book Review: “Educated” — An Exemplary Memoir

Educated is a testament to the power of sensitive friends and mentors — and to Tara Westover’s own resilience.

Educated by Tara Westover. Random House, 335 pages, $28.

By Helen Epstein

Educated by Tara Westover is the kind of memoir that keeps you reading late at night, though you know you should put it down. The writing is good, but it’s the story that’s extraordinary. It’s My Fair Lady meets Trauma and Recovery : a girl, the youngest of seven children in a survivalist household on a mountain in Idaho, decides to get an education. Inspired by an older brother, she studies for the ACT required by Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah and is accepted. Though deficient in basic social skills, personal hygiene, and many cultural references, she studies hard and excels.

A BYU professor chooses her for a fellowship program at Cambridge University, England; a Cambridge professor sends her on another fellowship to Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Think of the story, Tara,” her thesis advisor tells her, alluding to George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion after Tara says she’d enjoy serving dinner more than being served. “She was just a cockney in a nice dress. Until she believed in herself. Then it didn’t matter what dress she wore.”

Education, for Tara Westover, means not only mastering the body of knowledge required by Western institutions of higher learning, but acquiring a psychological understanding of herself and her breed of survivalist family. At home, she learned about herbalism – gathering and preparing tinctures of lobelia, calendula, and skullcap, feeding livestock, and working with scrap metal in a junkyard. She has also been taught lessons about deprivation, violence, and psychological bullying, particularly coping with their depredations. Trauma is the subtext of this memoir about a girl growing up and breaking away, and there is a lot of it.

The Westovers were once part of their mainstream Mormon community (Tara’s grandparents live in conventional American homes), but by the time she is born they are living on its fringe. Though the older children were initially sent to school, then home-schooled by their mother, she and her six siblings are increasingly dominated by a father she calls “Gene,” a man who receives revelations and inveighs against the evil influence of what he calls “the Illuminati.”

His paranoia is exacerbated in 1992 by a government that lays siege to and kills a member of another Idaho survivalist family — the Weavers. The Westover children help preserve and stockpile food as well as ammunition for ‘The End of Days’; they also  build barns and work in their father’s junkyard. Their mother is an herbalist and unlicensed midwife, officiating at risky home births. She is unable to protect her children from her husband’s erratic, sometimes loving, but often abusive behavior. Tara also has an unpredictable, often violent older brother.

The memoir begins with a school bus rolling down the highway without stopping to pick up seven-year-old Tara:

Dad worries that the Government will force us to go [to school] but it can’t, because it doesn’t know about us. 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. When I am nine, I will be issued a Delayed Certificate of Birth, but at this moment, according to the state of Idaho and the federal government I do not exist.

The narrator doesn’t provide much background for her parents, beyond suggesting that they themselves had gone to high school, and that Gene was himself the son of a “hot-tempered” father, who had served a two-year mission proselytizing in Florida before marrying at 21. After his return, he moved off his parents’ farm and up the mountain and became part of the ultra-religious, survivalist wing of the counter-culture of the ’70s. Like many hippies, he discouraged his children from eating processed food or washing much. He refused to have them vaccinated or given conventional medications, such as aspirin. He took them out of school, got rid of the family phone (though,interestingly, not his TV), stopped registering for a driver’s license and insuring his car. He ignored seatbelts — a practice that resulted in brain injury to his wife and other injuries to his children in car accidents — and was so cavalier about workplace safety that he and his children were injured there too.

Those injuries, however grave, were treated with herbs and sunlight. Psychological wounds were not noticed. Westover details the chaos of the household and junkyard, as well as the beauty of the mountain and her love for her parents and older brothers.

What makes Educated different from other books about tyrannical fathers, dysfunctional families, isolated cults, or children who have escaped is Westover’s powerful depiction of her immense love for — and loyalty to — her father and his ways, the depth of her conflict about contravening him, and her paucity of information about any other way of life. Gene is estranged from (and has kept his family mostly apart from) all four of Tara’s grandparents as well as from the local Mormon community. He believes that BYU and the Mormon Church have been infiltrated by the “Illuminati” and his wife, especially after her brain injury, does not argue with his beliefs.

When Tara passes her ACT and enters BYU at the age of 17 the family makes it hard for her to leave, but they do not prevent it. Her challenges are immense: she has had little experience of people outside her immediate family. Although most of the new people she meets are Mormons, she is horrified by roommates as well as classmates who wear short skirts and shoulder-baring tops and shop on the Sabbath. In classes, she is lost: she has never heard of Napoleon or the Holocaust, and thinks Europe is a country. Her peers, in turn are horrified that 17-year-old Tara smells, rarely washes her hands, finds dirty dishes and rotting food normal, and is clueless about almost everything.

Author Tara Westover appearing on CBS This Morning.

Educated explores the many meanings of the word. It traces the education Westover received at home, the education she picked up in her small Idaho community, the enormous difficulties (including the enormous personal costs) and liberating effects of receiving an education in an alien culture. The chasm between isolated home and the world grows deeper and wider as Tara proceeds towards her PhD in history at Cambridge. Ultimately, she breaks down when she cannot bridge it.

She cannot tell one of her several significant teachers at Cambridge “that being here threw into great relief every violent and degrading moment of my life. At BYU I could almost forget … but the contrast here was too great, the world before my eyes too fantastical. The memories were more real — more believable — than the stone spires.”

Many of the people described in this narrative are essential to the survival of the extraordinary young woman at its center. Westover is even-handed in her characterizations of them as she moves from the religious world of Mormon Idaho to the secular academic worlds of the two Cambridges. Her book is a testament to the power of sensitive friends and mentors — and to her own resilience. This is one of the most unusual memoirs I have read in a long time, an exemplary example of a narrative in which someone leaves despotic, mentally disturbed parents and/or religious cults. I recommend it highly.

Helen Epstein is the author of the memoirs Where She Came From: A Daughter’s Search for her Mother’s History and The Long Half-Lives of Love and Trauma, both available from Plunkett Lake Press . She has reviewed for The Arts Fuse since 2010.

Thanks, Helen. I read and was spellbound by Educated . What beautiful, honest, and yet respectful writing. As a Jew and raised in a modern Orthodox community, there was some resonance despite her very specific and challenging upbringing. Good writing transcends and educates.

Very appreciative of your review, Helen. I am in the final chapters of this book and you helped to reinforce many of the threads I found so interesting – so far. Almost hate to finish it because there’ll be no more to read.

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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

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 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 Is a Brutal, One-of-a-Kind Memoir

Tara Westover's coming-of-age story follows her upbringing in a survivalist family, and her decision to leave that life behind.

T ara 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 siblings, too. The youngest child in a fundamentalist Mormon family living in the foothills of Buck’s Peak, in Idaho, she grew up with a father fanatically determined to protect his family against the “brainwashing” world. Defending his isolated tribe against the physical dangers—literally brain-crushing in some cases—of the survivalist life he imposed was another matter.

Westover, who didn’t set foot in school until she left home in adolescence, toiled at salvaging scrap in his junkyard, awaiting the end days and/or the invading feds her father constantly warned of. Neither came. Nor, amazingly, did death or defeat, despite grisly accidents. Terrified, impaled, set on fire, smashed—the members of this clan learned that pain was the rule, not the exception. But succumbing was not an option, a lesson that ultimately proved liberating for Westover.

In briskly paced prose, she evokes a childhood that completely defined her. Yet it was also, she gradually sensed, deforming her. Baffled, inspired, tenaciously patient with her ignorance, she taught herself enough to take the ACT and enter Brigham Young University at 17. She went on to Cambridge University for a doctorate in history.

For Westover, now turning 32, the mind-opening odyssey is still fresh. So is the soul-wrenching ordeal—she hasn’t seen her parents in years—that isn’t over.

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