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Summary - Educated: Tara Westover - A Memoir
A Complete Summary of Educated Educated, A Memoir is an autobiographical book written by young female author, Tara Westover. Although some readers may wonder the authenticity of the book since the author is a bit too young to write an autobiography, the quality of written content is without question. As the reader reads the book, he will have the opportunity to get to know Tara, her personal life, her past and her present. Growing up in a Mormon family, the life without electricity, poor education and medical care, Taras life was filled with many difficulties even before she started living it. However, regardless of that, Tara showed to the world that it is possible to succeed, regardless of how poor, unfortunate and difficult situation in which one lives, is. Forty chapters, which are easy and quick to read, but interesting and compelling, Educated A Memoir is a type of book that is destined to leave a mark in the lives of every reader. Here Is A Preview Of What You Will Get: In Educated, you will get a quick understanding of the book. In Educated, you will find the book analyzed to further strengthen your knowledge. In Educated, you will get some fun multiple choice quizzes, along with answers to help you learn about the book. Get a copy, and learn everything about Educated .
- GenresMemoir
56 pages, Paperback
Published July 25, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
January 26, 2020
The opening of Westover's memoir features bravura nature description of the Idaho wild wheat dancing like a corps de ballet. This establishes that Westover intends to play the painful psychological insights from her searing family memoir against the stark landscapes she roamed unfettered in her strange Idaho childhood. Pater familias is a religious paranoid schizophrenic prepping for the end of the world and determined to eliminate the evil secular government from every aspect of daily life. Westover portrays the idiosyncratic beliefs and conspiracy theories that ruled her family matter-of-factly, as if every extreme Mormon were just the folks next door. Her father and mother divide the world into a simple binary of Godly and Satanic, and bury fuel and stock preserves so the family can survive the Days of Abomination which are sure to follow the collapse of the Satanic World after Y2K.
Mom is a midwife, so she can save many local women from the evil intentions of hospital birthing. She gathers herbs and brews patent medicines that eventually become the basis of family prosperity. While the older kids attended some school, Tara Westover is born in the era when no schooling at all was allowed by her grim father. Influenced by the Weaver killings in Montana and the Waco deaths in a Federal attack on the David Koresh religious enclave in Texas, fear of the overwhelming force and malevolence of federal government is a daily concern. The author does not mock her father's beliefs but also does not shrink from describing the extremes that result. To avoid care by the satanic forces of modern medicine and hospitals, third degree burns, bone breakage and traumatic brain injuries are treated with homemade remedies and energy channeling. All the kids work with incredibly dangerous, often improvised equipment in the family metal scrapyard. For example, a set of 3 ton shears instantly tears a gash in the author's brother's arm, and she actually refuses her father's direct order to man the huge scissors after his injury. The narrative brims with hideous accidents, partially due to the rigors of hands-on work,and partially attributable to the extreme version of self-reliance and make-do decreed by the father. Two dreadful car crashes resulting from stubborn insistence on driving all night seriously injure her mother and other family members. A scrapyard accident burns the flesh off her father's body, but mom just picks dead skin off with tweezers and applies miracle salve. It is astonishing that family members survive the maiming, burning and blunt force injuries. Naturally, the family believes that the healing is a sign of God's approval of their avoidance of modern medicine.
The other narrative thread is that of a family power struggle so extreme that the children are often forced to chose between total obedience to often crazy mandates and total exile from the family which is the only human community they have been allowed to know. An older brother Shaun violently abuses her, and it turns out has done the same to her older sister. However, as she approaches maturity, leavened with knowledge of the outside world, her story of abuse is discredited and the violence of the obviously mentally ill brother is excused and shielded. She learns how difficult it is to fight back against family abuse. "People who love you have power over you."
Westover struggles mightily with the demonization of her urges to get an education and understand more of the world outside the narrow precepts of the family ideology. Oddly when she gets to Brigham Young University, she discovers that the largely Mormon student body dresses in a way her family viewed as very immodest, and engages in all kinds of practices that would have enraged her father, from drinking Coke to reading works by "Satanic" authors.
How did this plucky gal extricate herself from this powerful, insular world view and not only go to college but win fantastic scholarships and degrees from the best universities? Extraordinary grit underpins the chapters of her life, even as she wavers in seeking family approval while pursuing her own education. Defying her family she studies any books she can grab at the town's library and practices algebra and trig until she can solve equations and pass the ACT college admission test-- all with no teachers and no previous education other than Bible study.
The description of the depredations of father and brother are suffused with toxic masculinity under the guise of religion, yet actually so intertwined with mental illness and traumatic brain injuries, it's hard to apportion fault. The memoir is of course also a bildungsroman, and Westover gradually realizes that ignorance of the world is preventing her from knowing herself. She is already in her 20s when an NYU professor tells her "find out what you are capable of, then decide who you are." To an outsider, a city-living secular humanist, these people are so off the charts fanatic, it's hard to accept that this is actually a mindset that is fairly common in certain areas of the US. While it features its own version of nutty and dangerous convictions, one also sees the impact of the fact-free Fox news, evangelical playbook of suspicion, authoritarian rule and weirdness.
Mom is a midwife, so she can save many local women from the evil intentions of hospital birthing. She gathers herbs and brews patent medicines that eventually become the basis of family prosperity. While the older kids attended some school, Tara Westover is born in the era when no schooling at all was allowed by her grim father. Influenced by the Weaver killings in Montana and the Waco deaths in a Federal attack on the David Koresh religious enclave in Texas, fear of the overwhelming force and malevolence of federal government is a daily concern. The author does not mock her father's beliefs but also does not shrink from describing the extremes that result. To avoid care by the satanic forces of modern medicine and hospitals, third degree burns, bone breakage and traumatic brain injuries are treated with homemade remedies and energy channeling. All the kids work with incredibly dangerous, often improvised equipment in the family metal scrapyard. For example, a set of 3 ton shears instantly tears a gash in the author's brother's arm, and she actually refuses her father's direct order to man the huge scissors after his injury. The narrative brims with hideous accidents, partially due to the rigors of hands-on work,and partially attributable to the extreme version of self-reliance and make-do decreed by the father. Two dreadful car crashes resulting from stubborn insistence on driving all night seriously injure her mother and other family members. A scrapyard accident burns the flesh off her father's body, but mom just picks dead skin off with tweezers and applies miracle salve. It is astonishing that family members survive the maiming, burning and blunt force injuries. Naturally, the family believes that the healing is a sign of God's approval of their avoidance of modern medicine.
The other narrative thread is that of a family power struggle so extreme that the children are often forced to chose between total obedience to often crazy mandates and total exile from the family which is the only human community they have been allowed to know. An older brother Shaun violently abuses her, and it turns out has done the same to her older sister. However, as she approaches maturity, leavened with knowledge of the outside world, her story of abuse is discredited and the violence of the obviously mentally ill brother is excused and shielded. She learns how difficult it is to fight back against family abuse. "People who love you have power over you."
Westover struggles mightily with the demonization of her urges to get an education and understand more of the world outside the narrow precepts of the family ideology. Oddly when she gets to Brigham Young University, she discovers that the largely Mormon student body dresses in a way her family viewed as very immodest, and engages in all kinds of practices that would have enraged her father, from drinking Coke to reading works by "Satanic" authors.
How did this plucky gal extricate herself from this powerful, insular world view and not only go to college but win fantastic scholarships and degrees from the best universities? Extraordinary grit underpins the chapters of her life, even as she wavers in seeking family approval while pursuing her own education. Defying her family she studies any books she can grab at the town's library and practices algebra and trig until she can solve equations and pass the ACT college admission test-- all with no teachers and no previous education other than Bible study.
The description of the depredations of father and brother are suffused with toxic masculinity under the guise of religion, yet actually so intertwined with mental illness and traumatic brain injuries, it's hard to apportion fault. The memoir is of course also a bildungsroman, and Westover gradually realizes that ignorance of the world is preventing her from knowing herself. She is already in her 20s when an NYU professor tells her "find out what you are capable of, then decide who you are." To an outsider, a city-living secular humanist, these people are so off the charts fanatic, it's hard to accept that this is actually a mindset that is fairly common in certain areas of the US. While it features its own version of nutty and dangerous convictions, one also sees the impact of the fact-free Fox news, evangelical playbook of suspicion, authoritarian rule and weirdness.
January 1, 2020
This book has won many awards and was included on the Reading Women Challenge as a 2018 Reading Women Award shortlist. I couldn't put this book down. It has given me so much to think about in terms of my own upbringing. Tara Westover was raised in Idaho by a father who owns a junkyard, is suspicious of all forms of government and the medical establishment. He refuses to send his seven children to school. Three go on to earn PHD's, four never earn a high school equivalent. Tara has a difficult, unsafe upbringing. One of her brothers is abusive but her family fails to protect her. At 16, Tara passes the ACT having never attended public schools. She graduated from BYU and later earns a Masters and PhD from Cambridge. Her eyes are opened as she earns her formal education, but she loses relationship with many family members. This book is enthralling. It is not Teen/YA.
April 30, 2022
OMG, Stephen Fry's apparent excitement at finding this brave new author, Tara Westover, was the primary reason for me picking up this story, but the tale itself is truly shocking.
I was left thinking that here is the living proof of that desperate adage, 'you can pick your friends, but you can't pick your family' !
And I couldn't help but wonder why on earth did she keep going back to those people. Family or not, they are dangerous people who any sane person would want to avoid, and therein lies the final question, hanging, suspended, silent, trying to avoid an answer.
I was left thinking that here is the living proof of that desperate adage, 'you can pick your friends, but you can't pick your family' !
And I couldn't help but wonder why on earth did she keep going back to those people. Family or not, they are dangerous people who any sane person would want to avoid, and therein lies the final question, hanging, suspended, silent, trying to avoid an answer.
October 29, 2019
Compelling story of a woman coping with grave emotional neglect and abuse. Affirms that the pursuit of learning can change one's life remarkably, and highlights the courage of a woman who loves learning and persists, remarkably, in obtaining it. Demonstrates her resilience and learning to trust those who are trustworthy.
March 18, 2020
Very interesting read. The author had no formal education before she interested college. She also dealt with growing up in a household with machismo, as well as mental illness. While she educated herself, this lead her to see her family in a completely new life.
July 24, 2019
I loved this book could not wait to finish it
March 9, 2020
Absolutely fab. Book would recommend it to Cliona and Norbert
February 25, 2021
Having grown up in a religious cult myself, I identified so much with this book.
November 28, 2022
Excellent!! Great story, great strength of determination and overcoming challenges.
January 3, 2023
This is a good book, well-written and interesting. It seems I got about 2/3 through and then put it down for a long time, but more a problem with me than the book. Or perhaps once she got to Cambridge I checked out a bit knowing she'd be fine. I did finally finish it, and I'm not sure I can even remember the end. But it was an interesting and revealing window inside an isolated family with a domineering father struggling with bipolar disorder and religious fanaticism. Again, the writing is excellent.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews