I finally got around to reading the most praised book of 2018. It is brutal. I was prepared for the religious fanaticism, lack of education, and fear of government and doctors. I was not prepared for the amount of abuse, accidents, injuries, mental illness, and cruelty. I struggled through those difficult parts and gained an appreciation for the normal family I was raised in and raised my own daughter in. I guess the critics are right, overall a good read, but not really my cup […]
Everybody effing read this.
“Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose […]
“Conflicted” would have been a more accurate title
Tara Westover’s memoir, Educated, is difficult to digest. She’s the youngest of seven children in a fundamentalist Mormon family in rural Idaho. Her father rules with the proverbial iron fist. He’s a survivalist, a millennialist, a conspiracy-theorist. He keeps his children out of school, refuses them medical care, continually places them in physical danger. Her mother resists in small ways but ultimately caves whenever the father demands her submission. One of her brothers educates himself well enough to get into BYU and encourages Tara to […]
I Believe Her
#cbr10bingo Listicles Educated has been on the New York Times Combined Print and E-book Nonfiction Best Seller list for over 33 weeks. It is also one of Time Magazine’s Best Memoirs of 2018 So Far Educated: A Memoir is Tara Westover’s riveting account of how she went from growing up home schooled in a survivalist family in Idaho to PhD student of History at Cambridge. Westover is the youngest of seven children raised by parents whose goal was to live “off the grid” and who […]