Book Review | Educated by Tara Westover
A thrilling memoir to read. One of the Best books of 2018.
The essence of the book
The extremity of the author’s upbringing and the journey to find herself through books make this memoir distinctly personal, unique, and thrilling to read.
This book tells the story of a girl’s transformation from being raised in a Mormon fundamentalist home in Idaho into a doctoral candidate at Cambridge University. It is an incredibly honest and courageous story of Tara who never stepped a foot inside a high school.
Born and raised in a survivalist Mormon family, Tara’s childhood was endowed with extreme thoughts and orthodox beliefs. Some of them included the modern education system, western medicine, and strong views on the government. Her journey out of the mountain home wisens her up with the difference between old beliefs and the reality she experienced.
This book is a compelling story of grit and determination through the eyes of a 17-year-old girl sitting on a fence between parental opinions and reality checks. Her entire childhood was flooded and shaped by her dad's views and conspiracy theories he believed in. It is an engaging read from start to finish. It's a struggle she went through to identify and find her own reality and her new educated self. She attributes this transformation to Education.
Who should read it?
An awe-inspiring tumultuous journey of a young girl overcoming against all odds is the gist of Westover’s Educated. It’s her story of finding the path of self-discovery through the process of self-learning. Educated is an amazing story and that explains why it was on the top of the New York Times bestseller list for a long time.
Moreover, this book was one of the Bill Gates recommended books of the year 2018. Gates was so thrilled that he talked with Tara Westover about her book.
It is the kind of book I think everyone will enjoy.
My Favorite Quotes
“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.”
“It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you.”
“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.”
“He said positive liberty is self-mastery — the rule of the self, by the self. To have positive liberty, he explained, is to take control of one’s own mind; to be liberated from irrational fears and beliefs, from addictions, superstitions and all other forms of self-coercion.”
“I am not the child my father raised, but he is the father who raised her.”
“The decisions I made after that moment were not the ones she would have made. They were the choices of a changed person, a new self.
You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal.
I call it an education”
Rating: 9/10
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