What do you think?
Rate this book
Educated By Tara Westover, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis By J. D. Vance 2 Books Collection Set
Please Note That The Following Individual Books As Per Original ISBN and Cover Image In this Listing shall be Dispatched
Educated By Tara Westover, Hillbilly A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis By J. D. Vance 2 Books Collection
NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW ONE OF PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR BILL GATES’S HOLIDAY READING LIST National Book Critics Circle’s Award In Autobiography and John Leonard Prize For Best First Book PEN/Jean Stein Book Award Los Angeles Times Book Prize Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Her family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education, and no one to intervene when one of Tara’s older brothers became violent.
Hillbilly
Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for more than forty years, has been reported with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck.
Educated By Tara Westover, Hillbilly A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis By J. D. Vance 2 Books Collection
NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW ONE OF PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR BILL GATES’S HOLIDAY READING LIST National Book Critics Circle’s Award In Autobiography and John Leonard Prize For Best First Book PEN/Jean Stein Book Award Los Angeles Times Book Prize Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Her family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education, and no one to intervene when one of Tara’s older brothers became violent.
Hillbilly
Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for more than forty years, has been reported with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck.
656 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2022
8 people are currently reading
315 people want to read
About the author
Tara Westover
6 books20.7k followersTara Westover is an American author living in the UK. Born in Idaho to a father opposed to public education, she never attended school. She spent her days working in her father's junkyard or stewing herbs for her mother, a self-taught herbalist and midwife. She was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom, and after that first taste, she pursued learning for the next decade. She received a 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 PhD in history in 2014.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
June 18, 2025
This is one of the most powerful and well-written memoirs I've ever read. In its first half a young girl spends lonely years in the wide-open sanctuary of the American West: "Her classroom was a heap of junk. Her textbooks, slates of scrap," Westover writes. In the second half the whole world and its history open up to her, but at a high price: "having sacrificed my family to my education." The author remains estranged from her parents, and the siblings have formed two factions: four work for her parents' herbal empire in Idaho; three left to pursue education, all obtaining doctoral degrees. Which route would you choose?
-Rebecca Foster
Read the full review at: https://www.bookbrowse.com/mag/review...
-Rebecca Foster
Read the full review at: https://www.bookbrowse.com/mag/review...
July 31, 2024
I just finished the 2nd book in the duo book set. For some reason Goodreads isn’t allowing me to review one of these books, not sure why, anyway.
Book books were emotional in the best way. When I read a book from an author that can make their work come to life, it allows you to feel. Both works a blessing to read. I highly recommend both books. You never know how you can be touched with a book if you don’t pick it up. Powerful indeed!!!
I listen to the audiobook for both, it really gives the listener a different feel.
Book books were emotional in the best way. When I read a book from an author that can make their work come to life, it allows you to feel. Both works a blessing to read. I highly recommend both books. You never know how you can be touched with a book if you don’t pick it up. Powerful indeed!!!
I listen to the audiobook for both, it really gives the listener a different feel.
January 11, 2025
This is a fascinating memoir and true story. It made me think of aspects of my own life experiences and education. I probably could write a paper about “Education” but still digesting what was written. My husband suggested that I read it after he did and I took him up on it. So very grateful that I did!
July 31, 2024
Both authors were able to bring their books to life. I listen to both of them and was touched. Such powerful work. That is hard to find. I highly recommend both these books. I also recommend listening to them, it gives it a different flavor.
May 31, 2023
My second reading has left me largely skeptical of this controversial home affairs tell all horror come redemption by education!!
I cannot find answers for three basic questions:
1. Why did Tara write such a destructive and divisive family account?? Is she actually the terrorist in this family?
2. Who are you really Tara after all this transformational education? Not your avatar self,curated in the “ novel”, but your “uninstagrammable self” away from all those high powered interviews with celebrities?
3. How does a home schooled girl who hated academics but loved singing for an audience from Buck’s Peak Idaho come to write a New York Times Bestseller and have PhDs from Cambridge and Harvard?? All without a ghost writer and on pure home grown genius?
In this age of fake news, fake presidents, I dare to ask if this memoir is a fake page turner of substantially unreliable memories where truth is left in the wake of some twisted desire to expose and hurt the very ones she claims she still loves but had to leave behind because of their trapped enslavement to a nightmare cause like End Times.
The nightmare Tara had of running through an endless maze of ammunition boxes, secret water and fuel storage dumps, stacked preserved food without any hope of escape is I believe is a symbolic representation of the “fiction” Tara has fashioned to achieve a runaway viral success.
It’s important to hear Tara’s mother counter version in “Educating” or find very rare reviewers who have tested Tara’s account against major characters who when interviewed saw events in radically different terms. Or travelling to the very places Tara describes so majestically like Buck’s Peak to be very ordinary, or the remote isolation of their idyllic valley to actually be quite suburban.
This a “dangerous” book that to me serves no uplifting purpose… I also find it almost implausible that Brigham Young University actually has it as compulsory reading in courses.
I cannot find answers for three basic questions:
1. Why did Tara write such a destructive and divisive family account?? Is she actually the terrorist in this family?
2. Who are you really Tara after all this transformational education? Not your avatar self,curated in the “ novel”, but your “uninstagrammable self” away from all those high powered interviews with celebrities?
3. How does a home schooled girl who hated academics but loved singing for an audience from Buck’s Peak Idaho come to write a New York Times Bestseller and have PhDs from Cambridge and Harvard?? All without a ghost writer and on pure home grown genius?
In this age of fake news, fake presidents, I dare to ask if this memoir is a fake page turner of substantially unreliable memories where truth is left in the wake of some twisted desire to expose and hurt the very ones she claims she still loves but had to leave behind because of their trapped enslavement to a nightmare cause like End Times.
The nightmare Tara had of running through an endless maze of ammunition boxes, secret water and fuel storage dumps, stacked preserved food without any hope of escape is I believe is a symbolic representation of the “fiction” Tara has fashioned to achieve a runaway viral success.
It’s important to hear Tara’s mother counter version in “Educating” or find very rare reviewers who have tested Tara’s account against major characters who when interviewed saw events in radically different terms. Or travelling to the very places Tara describes so majestically like Buck’s Peak to be very ordinary, or the remote isolation of their idyllic valley to actually be quite suburban.
This a “dangerous” book that to me serves no uplifting purpose… I also find it almost implausible that Brigham Young University actually has it as compulsory reading in courses.
July 15, 2024
I read this book after Hillbilly Elegy as it was more of a personal biography rather than a political agenda.
However, another more academic book would be White Trash by Eisenberg.
However, another more academic book would be White Trash by Eisenberg.
May 20, 2025
Touching, heart-breaking, impossible to put down. The best book I read last year.
Read
December 9, 2025A powerful memoir about resilience and the pursuit of knowledge. Tara’s story is both inspiring and thought-provoking. Recommended for readers who appreciate transformative personal journeys.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews