Saturday, September 7, 2019

Book Review on Educated by Tara Westover

 A Book Review on



I watched her interview on television one day while I was on vacation. The author of this memoir was a  Mormon girl who never went to a school or to a doctor. But then she taught herself to take an ACT test, got into BYU college, then to Cambridge and later earned a Ph. D from Harvard.  The book is a best seller. I ordered the book from  Amazon as in the library my waiting position was thirty-fifth.  I couldn’t wait that long. 

After reading I felt like talking about it, sharing it with the whole world.  It touched me. I absolutely loved it. Once started I couldn’t put it down and gobbled the whole 350 pages or so in two and a half days. 

There are several levels to this piece. White supremacy, control of power, bullying, feminism, religion, psychology, all these things are interwoven. But what was striking to me was the lucid language, the frankness in the storytelling. 

The vulnerability of the protagonist girl in this memoir, her desire to go back to her old life,  to that dysfunctional family where she was beaten, traumatized and brainwashed, broke my heart. I would whisper, ‘Please don’t go back, Tara,’ turning the pages to see what happens next. 

Education opens eyes. It educates her to review history with a different lens.

It’s a beautiful memoir where as a reader I could understand how our family builds our core, the foundation of our values, no matter how wrong and warped they be, and how education reshapes that. Transforms even transcends us. What a price to pay!





Favorite excerpts:

“I could tolerate any form of cruelty better than kindness. Praise was poison to me; I choked on it. I wanted the professor to shout at me.I felt dizzy from the deprivation.”  Pg 241

“ The most powerful detriment of who you are is inside you. …Remember Pygmalion…Until she believed in herself …it didn’t matter what dress she wore.” Pg 242


“When the stillness shattered and his fury rushed at me, I would know that something I had done was the catalyst, the cause…There was hope in such superstition: there is illusion of control. Pg 283. 
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