| Title | Educated: A Memoir |
| Author | Tara Westover |
| Type | Biography, Autobiography |
| Year of Publication | February 18, 2018 |
| Language | English |
| File Format | |
| Number of Pages | 352 |
| Rating | Click to rate this post! [Total: 1 Average: 5] |
Educated is a memoir By the American author Tara Westover. In it, Westover recounts how she outgrew her surviving Mormon family in order to go to college and emphasizes the importance of education in expanding her world. She details her journey from her isolated life in the mountains of Idaho to completing a doctoral program in history at the University of Cambridge. She began college at the age of seventeen after having had no formal education, and her book explores her struggle to reconcile her desire to learn with the radical world she inhabited with her father.
As of May 2020, the book had been on the New York Times bestseller nonfiction list for 114 weeks. She won an Alex Award in 2019 and was shortlisted for the LA Times Book Prize, the PEN America Jean Stein Book Award, and two National Book Critics Circle Award awards.
Table of Contents
Book Summary
Tara Westover was 17 the first time she stepped foot in a classroom. Born to survivors in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by storing canned peaches at home and sleeping with her “head bag up the hills.” In the summer she cooked herbs for her mother, a midwife, and healer, and in the winter she saved them in her father’s junkyard.
Her father banned hospitals, so Tara never saw a doctor or nurse. Cuts and concussions, including blast burns, were treated at home with herbalism. The family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure that the children received an education and no one to intervene when one of Tara’s older siblings became violent.
Later, lacking formal education, Tara began to educate herself. She taught herself enough in math and grammar to be admitted to Brigham Young University, where she studied history, and for the first time learned about major world events like the Holocaust and the civil rights movement. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her across oceans and continents, to Harvard and Cambridge. Only then would she wonder if she had traveled too far if there was still a way home.
Educated is an account of the struggle for self-invention. It is a story of fierce family loyalty and the pain that comes with breaking the closest bond. With the keen 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 life through new eyes. and the will to change. that.
Book Review
Westover has somehow managed to not only capture his unsurpassed and exceptional upbringing but to make his current situation seem not so exceptional at all and resonate with many others.
About The Author of The Book Tara Westover
Tara Westover was born in Idaho in 1986. She received her BA 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 Ph.D. in history in 2014. Educated is her first book.
Educated: A Memoir PDF
