hazelgrace2's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
sad
fast-paced
5.0
dorothy_gale's review against another edition
5.0
FAITH OVER SAFETY. I wanted to hate this book. I resisted it. I refused to read it. I put it on my list because it was so popular, then I took it off, telling a friend that it “seemed like she was playing the victim card, but she sure has profited from it.” I don't know what had me put it back on my list, but I'm glad I did.
Buck's Peak, Idaho, where Tara Westover was raised, is a mere 600 miles from me, as the crow flies. She's three years younger than my middle sister. Her father's passion for emergency preparedness and self-sufficiency would have been admirable if it weren't so misguided. The mother's journey in healthcare was also quite the respectable endeavor, if she wasn't forced into it. And since the pandemic, I have a solid appreciation for homeschooling. The thought of homeschooling seven kids, while managing a household and working an on-call, life-or-death job, is completely unfathomable. So, the way the Westover family navigated their education challenges and how each child came to their pivotal decisions -- made sense. The faith and loyalties of this family were strong, even enviable. They worked together, traveled together, worshipped together. They had their own version of a Mafia, not for crime or politics, but as an entity attempting to control a specific arena. That arena was the family's survival of the end of times, and their righteous passage through the pearly gates. Intentions were pure; morals were noble. When one understands what they believed, their behavior makes total sense. As my friend David says, ones actions are always consistent with their perceptions.
But then came the safety incidents. With the mother, one brother, another brother, with Tara herself -- multiple incidents. Near death, life-altering incidents. And violence. My empathy began to get shaky when pitted against my sacred value for safety. At this point, I wasn't even halfway through the book. We already knew that Tara clearly survived, but at what cost? What kind of person did she become, and who of her hazardous family remained?
Tara does have a knack for natural storytelling, maybe because her family told stories in the days without a telephone or TV. The way she was transparent about differing and possibly faulty memories was refreshing. I'm glad she wrote this book while relatively young [she published at age 31.5] -- to capture the details before they morphed or evaporated. I say this as someone whose memories have morphed and evaporated.
I could also empathize with Tara a bit around living in isolation, both culturally and geographically. And with the Not Knowing things as a result of that isolation. I distinctly remember my first 'Knowledge Bowl' experience in high school. Of leaving my rural town at the “beginning of the world” hours before dawn for a 3-hour drive for our first competition. I was my school's MVP. I was my school's best, and my team placed last. My school's teams dominated the bottom of the rankings, and our neighboring town 20 miles closer to civilization placed just one slot above us. It was like that for my next three years of competition. But it was after that very first competition at age 15 when I knew that I didn't know shit. I think I've been trying to make-up for it ever since.
I actually think I learned the full extent of the holocaust and civil rights movement years after Tara did. I'm still learning. She had two particular quotes that resonated with me on Not Knowing: (1) “What a person knows about the past is limited, and will always be limited, to what they are told by others” and (2) “I knew what it was to have a misconception corrected -- a misconception of such magnitude that shifting it, shifted the world.” I think a survivalist's knowledge is on a need-to-know basis. Crimes against humanity could exist in a vacuum.
Tara described a reunion with her parents at BYU, where they came to the campus for the first time in her four years there. They were at a restaurant when she listened differently to what they said and had a moment of total disbelief. Not at what they said, but at herself for believing the family story for so long. I had that moment too, coincidentally with my parents in a restaurant. I called my brother afterwards to let him know that a central pillar of our childhood was a sham. We felt duped.
Tara had an inner battle over the morality of caffeine; mine was the morality of raw seafood.
After my reckoning of knowledge, I began to choose what others told me in preparation for leaving my isolated world. I went to summer college at PLU, which was four hours from home. I took English and Writing, and had a similar experience to Tara's at Oxford. She had the luxury of being told that her story was Shaw's Pygmalion. I didn't know that my story was Pygmalion until, at nearly 44 years old, I read Tara's story.
Tara's learning around feminism occurred much younger than mine did. I estimate that she was 22 when she dove into early feminist texts; I was 41 when I first read Mary Wollstonecraft. Tara was studying feminism likely to unlearn religious doctrine. I was studying the evolution of feminism to evaluate whether any Christian doctrine was worth teaching to my kids. It wasn't.
Tara benefitted from an older sister who could corroborate their brother's nature. Someone to stand with as they confronted their parents about him. “Without you I will probably lose” her elder sister said. I didn't have an older sister, and I lost.
I also felt for Tara's plight as the first college-educated daughter, for living with a junk-collecting father who had undiagnosed mental illness, and struggling to watch a strong mother slip into resignation and victimhood. Despite the mother being the backbone and breadwinner, the security and sanity.
Tara wrote of a new type of resentment for her education after questioning what it had cost her. I've been there too.
My initial judgment about this book was wrong. According to her agent, “Educated has sold more than 8 million copies and has been translated into 45 languages. President Barack Obama included Educated on his annual reading list, calling it “remarkable,” and Bill Gates listed it as one of his favorite books of the year, saying, “It's even better than you've heard.”” It definitely deserves its 4.46-star average by 1,077,039 Goodreads reviewers... which is about 290k more reviewers than Michelle Obama's Becoming has, and they were published the same year.
Buck's Peak, Idaho, where Tara Westover was raised, is a mere 600 miles from me, as the crow flies. She's three years younger than my middle sister. Her father's passion for emergency preparedness and self-sufficiency would have been admirable if it weren't so misguided. The mother's journey in healthcare was also quite the respectable endeavor, if she wasn't forced into it. And since the pandemic, I have a solid appreciation for homeschooling. The thought of homeschooling seven kids, while managing a household and working an on-call, life-or-death job, is completely unfathomable. So, the way the Westover family navigated their education challenges and how each child came to their pivotal decisions -- made sense. The faith and loyalties of this family were strong, even enviable. They worked together, traveled together, worshipped together. They had their own version of a Mafia, not for crime or politics, but as an entity attempting to control a specific arena. That arena was the family's survival of the end of times, and their righteous passage through the pearly gates. Intentions were pure; morals were noble. When one understands what they believed, their behavior makes total sense. As my friend David says, ones actions are always consistent with their perceptions.
But then came the safety incidents. With the mother, one brother, another brother, with Tara herself -- multiple incidents. Near death, life-altering incidents. And violence. My empathy began to get shaky when pitted against my sacred value for safety. At this point, I wasn't even halfway through the book. We already knew that Tara clearly survived, but at what cost? What kind of person did she become, and who of her hazardous family remained?
Tara does have a knack for natural storytelling, maybe because her family told stories in the days without a telephone or TV. The way she was transparent about differing and possibly faulty memories was refreshing. I'm glad she wrote this book while relatively young [she published at age 31.5] -- to capture the details before they morphed or evaporated. I say this as someone whose memories have morphed and evaporated.
I could also empathize with Tara a bit around living in isolation, both culturally and geographically. And with the Not Knowing things as a result of that isolation. I distinctly remember my first 'Knowledge Bowl' experience in high school. Of leaving my rural town at the “beginning of the world” hours before dawn for a 3-hour drive for our first competition. I was my school's MVP. I was my school's best, and my team placed last. My school's teams dominated the bottom of the rankings, and our neighboring town 20 miles closer to civilization placed just one slot above us. It was like that for my next three years of competition. But it was after that very first competition at age 15 when I knew that I didn't know shit. I think I've been trying to make-up for it ever since.
I actually think I learned the full extent of the holocaust and civil rights movement years after Tara did. I'm still learning. She had two particular quotes that resonated with me on Not Knowing: (1) “What a person knows about the past is limited, and will always be limited, to what they are told by others” and (2) “I knew what it was to have a misconception corrected -- a misconception of such magnitude that shifting it, shifted the world.” I think a survivalist's knowledge is on a need-to-know basis. Crimes against humanity could exist in a vacuum.
Tara described a reunion with her parents at BYU, where they came to the campus for the first time in her four years there. They were at a restaurant when she listened differently to what they said and had a moment of total disbelief. Not at what they said, but at herself for believing the family story for so long. I had that moment too, coincidentally with my parents in a restaurant. I called my brother afterwards to let him know that a central pillar of our childhood was a sham. We felt duped.
Tara had an inner battle over the morality of caffeine; mine was the morality of raw seafood.
After my reckoning of knowledge, I began to choose what others told me in preparation for leaving my isolated world. I went to summer college at PLU, which was four hours from home. I took English and Writing, and had a similar experience to Tara's at Oxford. She had the luxury of being told that her story was Shaw's Pygmalion. I didn't know that my story was Pygmalion until, at nearly 44 years old, I read Tara's story.
Tara's learning around feminism occurred much younger than mine did. I estimate that she was 22 when she dove into early feminist texts; I was 41 when I first read Mary Wollstonecraft. Tara was studying feminism likely to unlearn religious doctrine. I was studying the evolution of feminism to evaluate whether any Christian doctrine was worth teaching to my kids. It wasn't.
Tara benefitted from an older sister who could corroborate their brother's nature. Someone to stand with as they confronted their parents about him. “Without you I will probably lose” her elder sister said. I didn't have an older sister, and I lost.
I also felt for Tara's plight as the first college-educated daughter, for living with a junk-collecting father who had undiagnosed mental illness, and struggling to watch a strong mother slip into resignation and victimhood. Despite the mother being the backbone and breadwinner, the security and sanity.
Tara wrote of a new type of resentment for her education after questioning what it had cost her. I've been there too.
My initial judgment about this book was wrong. According to her agent, “Educated has sold more than 8 million copies and has been translated into 45 languages. President Barack Obama included Educated on his annual reading list, calling it “remarkable,” and Bill Gates listed it as one of his favorite books of the year, saying, “It's even better than you've heard.”” It definitely deserves its 4.46-star average by 1,077,039 Goodreads reviewers... which is about 290k more reviewers than Michelle Obama's Becoming has, and they were published the same year.
readsandreality's review against another edition
hopeful
informative
sad
medium-paced
4.0
Overall great memoir, however, there is one chapter that frequently uses the n-word with the hard er that readers are not warned of.
bookitalum's review against another edition
4.0
Westover is a wonderful author, with a true gift for storytelling. Her story is truly a harrowing one. AND this is a memoir, not an autobiography. The difference is palpable in the narrative.
tfelmey's review against another edition
5.0
Read this. It's difficult to imagine living and processing Tara's childhood, she persevered. I read memoirs like this and and want my life to mean more.
shakala's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
reflective
sad
medium-paced
5.0
tasha_slone's review against another edition
5.0
“Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were.”
― Tara Westover, Educated
This book is powerful. It shines on and evaluates in depth the culture that berates us today. How mental illness can persuade us to perceive the world through different lenses. Also, it goes into depth about the influences our family has on our perception. I took many similarities from this book, albeit more subdued. It’s astonishing to me that we still live in a society that this still happening.
― Tara Westover, Educated
This book is powerful. It shines on and evaluates in depth the culture that berates us today. How mental illness can persuade us to perceive the world through different lenses. Also, it goes into depth about the influences our family has on our perception. I took many similarities from this book, albeit more subdued. It’s astonishing to me that we still live in a society that this still happening.