Probably one of the best memoirs I have ever read and the strength and resilience of the author is very admirable. This is a profound book and I hope everyone gets the opportunity to read it. Deserves all the accolades it has received.

This had to be one of my favorite books of 2018. This memoir follows Tara Westover's upbringing from Idaho and the abusive relationship she had with her father and brothers. Her writing style is impeccable and truly provides you with the feeling of being there when she relates her family history. I was very touched by her character and how she overcame the odds of a rotten childhood. She maintained optimism and was able to work her way out of her home and upbringing. This is one I would read again.

I enjoyed this book. I found it really interesting and I wanted to read on to find out what happened to Tara. It was interesting to learn about someone who is secluded a lot from the outside world and whose father dictates to the family. I would have liked to learn more about Tara herself and her relationships with people outside her family.
I would recommend this book.

Earlier in the year I picked up a book because there was a character who seemed to be so much like me. I was dispirited because she was nothing like me, and because the book turned out to not have much depth.

When I started reading Educated I found a character who had a childhood that was more similar to mine than anyone I had ever met. Reading about her family struggles, and her choices, was less triggering and more liberating. It takes courage to be able to speak about the unspeakable. It takes talent to be able to transcribe the emotions and experiences in a way that would engage her readers rather than alienate them.

I do not think the writing was technically perfect at all times. I think there was some choices in using time that was not the most effective, and there was some times that I wished the writing was a little more polished. Yet, these instances were small and were pale compared to the actual overall work.

I would be interested in a follow up memoir, one less focused on her childhood and more focused on her adulthood. I feel like Westover has a lot more left to say, and I would first in line to read it.

A brutal memoir that pulls no punches detailing Westover's upbringing in a devout Mormon family in small-town Idaho. Her father, potentially suffering from undiagnosed bipolar disorder, is a staunch believer in the word of the Mormon church and also most major conspiracy theories, opting to have his family always prepped and ready for the impending apocalypse, eking out a living managing the family scrapping business, supplemented by his wife's midwifery and herbalist tincture business.
Home-schooled for most of her life, she doesn't step inside a schoolroom until the age of 17, by which point most of her education has been delivered by either one of her brothers or herself. By this age, she has learnt a lot of far harsher lessons at the hands of her family - physically bullied by her brother, and forced to work for the family businesses, from breaking down scrap and blending herbs.
Her childhood is decidedly unorthodox with a series of somewhat jaw-dropping decisions made by her father that always seem to end in longterm health issues for one of the family - two end up serious burns victims, two end up with serious head injuries, and none of them make it through without some serious scarring. Car crashes, heavy machinery incidents, falls, fires, explosions.... And throughout, a complete avoidance of professional medical help, with the belief that God will sort everything out.
As Westover seeks to better herself with education, a gulf starts to form between her more primitive background and her new life in the gilded halls of academia, forcing her to ultimately decide between her past and her future.
This is a fascinating book, filled with some extraordinary stories of life off the grid in rural America, and at its heart the amazing story of Tara's journey from the scrapyard to a PhD at Cambridge University. Hugely recommended.

Tara Westover was born sometime in September of 1986, the youngest of seven children. She's not exactly sure of the date as she was born at home in a remote mountainous area of Idaho; an area popular with other off-the-grid folks living in the western US area known as the Mormon Corridor. There is no formal record of her birth; no birth certificate was issued until she was nine years old. Like most of their remote neighbors, the Westover family were, in name, Mormons.

Now in her early 30s, Tara shares her moving story. She begins with her apocalyptic childhood leading to her adult life off the Idaho mountain and alienated from most of her family. Her journey is harsh and painful but offered to the world openly and honestly. She exposes a side of life most people have no idea exists and tells us how difficult it is to question your parent's authority and concern for your well-being. She expresses the contradictions she finds herself facing; rebel against her parent's way of life thus alienating herself from those she loves and freeing herself to discover the past, present and future available to her through education.

I have floundered with this review. I really enjoyed the book but find it hard to tag it. It's not the usual "woe is me" memoir. Tara openly expresses love and affection for her family; something I am not sure I would feel under the circumstances. It is my opinion that the author had more than the general public in mind when she wrote the book; she wanted to educate the world about the fundamentalist culture, the bizarre and dangerous life she faced with eccentric parents and she needed to justify leaving her loved ones behind to allow herself the freedom to control her own life as she saw fit.

By the time she was born, her mother, overwhelmed with the number of children and the hard work of a subsistence lifestyle had given up on home schooling. She felt her job was done if she taught the children to read. To be fair, there was never a restriction on the children's reading interests, but any child with an itch to read did so discretely after a full day's chores. Tara had access to her older siblings aged text books and rabidly self-educated herself.

Tara Westover was not raised in a traditional Mormon family. Her father demanded total obedience in all matters and maintained control over his family's daily routine. The slightest action could turn him into a demonic authority pontificating his own version of Mormon fundamentals. In this markedly patriarchal environment, male siblings held power over the girls; one particular brother was a cruel bully. Another brother was helpful in encouraging Tara to find her true north.

Imagine a world where your parents told you that everything outside their front door was corrupt. That something called the Deep State had eliminated personal freedoms and the "Medical Establishment" could not be trusted. The family would avoid hospitals and doctors regardless of the severity of the illness or injury.

Her father consumed with an "End of the World" theory, built massive supplies of food, weaponry, and ammunition to protect his family from renegades unprepared for survival in an apocalyptic world. He worked his children like indentured servants in a dangerous junkyard to pay for the supplies. Horrific physical injuries befall several family members; treatment restricted to mother's self-created herbal medicines. If a sick or injured person failed to survive on their own at home, it was just God's will.

Over time, Tara's older siblings peeled away from the family home, escaping their father's control leaving a very young Tara to fill their shoes in the junkyard. By the time she was fifteen-years-old, she began planning her own escape. She found odd jobs in a nearby town, made friendships outside the survivalist culture and devoured any and all sources of literature to prepare to take the college ACT test. At seventeen-years-old she enrolled at Brigham Young University, and discovered how much of life she knew nothing about.

One of first lectures, I raised my hand and asked
what the Holocaust was because I had never heard of it.

Encouraged by "outsiders" who recognized her potential, Tara Westover has achieved a first-class education. It was a struggle at first to fill in the blank slate but she graduated from Brigham Young University with honors in 2008. Following graduation she was awarded a Gates Cambridge Scholarship and earned a Masters in Philosophy from Trinity College, Cambridge in 2009. In 2010 she became a visiting fellow at Harvard University. She returned to Cambridge University where she was award a PhD in history in 2014.

Recommended reading. An excellent book club selection.

I would relate Tara Westover's childhood to fitting heartbreakingly in between The Glass Castle and A Child Called "It". Westover's Educated is a soul-bearing work that will leave readers shocked and appalled. Educated is not only one young woman's life with a bipolar father, but also an abusive brother, a misguided mother, and a warped sense of self. The lengths to which Westover's father goes in order to remain a purist of the Mormon faith leaves a tragic trail of pain, confusion, and fear for his children. The memories Westover shares are so painstakingly detailed that readers will feel they are a part of her experience instead of mere observers. There were times I wished I could reach out and shake her, punch her abusive brother, and scream at her parents to wake up and see what was right in front of them. Much respect to Tara Westover for reliving these horrific memories in order to share her outstanding story with the world.

Educated is an outstanding memoir. Readers will be shaking their heads in disbelief as they read, Tara Westover's harrowing account of growing up among a fundamentalist, mentally disturbed, family. Although the topic could be depressing, Ms. Westover's ultimate triumph makes this a worthwhile read. Don't miss it!

This is one of the best memoirs I have ever read. Once I finished it, I immediately started reading all the other writing and news articles around it, researching the Westover family and the other conflict prepper families have had with the government that are referenced in the book. This book touched me deeply, emotionally. Despite that fact that my life circumstances are so different from the Westover family, Tara's journey was so human, it inspires great connection and empathy with her experience. It is easy to get lost in the story, and forget your surroundings. I can't remember the last time I was so thoroughly engrossed in a memoir. I was left with a strong sense of despair, grief, and trauma, but also optimism, change, potential. I was completely inspired by the tenacity, persistence, and brilliance of both the telling and the experience.

I’m not quite sure how to approach a review of this book. I can understand its immense popularity because Westover’s life experience growing up was different from many but then very much like some. This is a extremely well-written memoir that kept me in rapt attention. Without giving away her story, I will say that those who have had estranged relationships with family members will appreciate this book and will also have understanding of what the author has experienced. I find it curious that some elements are downplayed in the narrative and some are downright gut-wrenching. I was expecting that more terrible things would happen to the author at the hands of her maniacal brother – not that what she experienced was already bad enough. I have a feeling that there is much that Westover left out of this book to further protect her estranged family. The one thing that I have taken from this story is that I want to personally explore relationships in my own life and decided what they mean to me and whether or not loyalty is due to those who mistreat and abuse their own kin. I would highly recommend this book to for the story of personal triumph that Tara Westover shares and all she sacrifices to be her own person and live on her own terms.

Tara Westover and her family lived a secluded life in Idaho. Their parents were extreme survivalists, thus they tried to teach their children how to live their life without technology, medical help, and even regular school. I can't even imagine how their parents deprived them of living an easy and normal life. They could still have taught them how to be survivalists without the opportunity to live just like everyone else.

Their parents, especially their dad, even let their kids handle works that are not appropriate to their age, just like dealing with huge machines that only adults should manage. Moreover, the time when they had a car accident and his dad didn't bring his wife to the hospital because he always believes that God will provide and that He will heal them from any pain or suffering.

We Filipinos have an idiomatic expression, "Nasa Diyos ang awa, nasa tao ang gawa," which is equivalent to English, "God helps those who help themselves." Apparent in the book's narrative that Tara's family is quite religious, and I believe that this teaching is even taught to all religions, including Mormons. I have a cousin and his children who are Mormons but they are unlike Tara's family because they are living the usual lives. I reckon his parents literally taken into account what is in the bible and that they were not properly guided or taught by their church's superiors about it. Or perhaps it is just that they fear too much about the doomsday, which no one knows when it will happen.

The biggest struggle for me is on how quite long it is that it was not that easy for me to finish it. It took me several months to be able to finish reading this book, without skipping parts or pages. But I was still satisfied because I got to know about what's going on the everyday lives of the survivalists and I can't help but thank heavens that I was not born in the family of Tara.

One of my top reads of the year, this one is impossible to put down. Tara Westover does an amazing job of describing her difficult childhood and the struggles she faced in getting an education. It's amazing how determined she was to succeed despite the limitations she was raised with. The writing is impeccable and the story flows smoothly from beginning to end. A must have for my library collection.

I think I'm one of the only people who couldn't get into this title, and I tried a few different times. It just wasn't for me!

Wow, what a book! Reminds me a little of my own childhood, only I actually had the privilege of attending school. Compelling, gripping, and powerful. This is something everyone should read, if only to see what does go on in our country to some individuals.

Education has the power to change and challenge human identity. Opens up the mind, put into questions family realities and truth, and invites you to think. Think freely.

Tara Westover entered a classroom for the first time in her life at 17 and since then she went to Harvard and got a PhD at Cambridge. She grew up in a complicated family, that refused to use the doctor's services and harbored a very extreme conspirationist view of the world. (However they used email). She did not have a birth certificate until 9 and had a very limited knowledge about the outside world. She thaught herself algebra and successfully passed the exams necessary to enroll to college and despite the self-doubts and family pressure, she did not give up learning and getting herself an education.

'Everything I had worked for, all my years of study had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truth that those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind'. And what a long way she went, as education means more than going through a comprehensive bibliography, but reclaiming her own story, her own identity and system of thoughts which meant also conquering her fears and coping with the extremely aggressive behavior of one of her brothers. The world of her family, which was an extreme interpretation of Mormonism, was dictated by the moods and erratic behavior of her father, and the individually strong yet prone to denial mother, a self-made herbalist and midwife with a booming business in their hometown Idaho.

Building the reality she was deprived of, trying to cope with the permanent denial of the agressive behavior of her brother, 'Shawn' - a given name in the book -, the activation of family loyalties to reject the accusation of denial, the pressure Tara had to deal with were terrific and she almost collapsed under the psychological pressure. 'When life itself seems lunatic, who knows were madness lies?' An old world is broken into small little pieces and she shall start creating her new reality in order to cope with a world she doesn't know. This is the strength of education, to get you a freedom, but only after you were strong enough to break with the un-educated world.

At the beginning, I've found the first part of the book, relating Tara's life and childhood a bit too descriptive and way to fluffy, but actually it made sense in correlation with the second part, but at the end of the story the details make sense as they clarify at a great extent the 'educated' story covering her struggle to create her own narrative. What for me it was fascinated, was how those people survived in their world always ready for the end of times, suffering of burns and serious car accidents and never going to the doctor for a proper treatment, yet being able to survive.

Educated, by Tara Westover is a wise book about the devastating power of knowledge and its strength that it gives to courageous people. There is no other way back.

I am a member of the ALA Carnegie Medal Committee. This title made the 2019 Longlist but it did not make the Shortlist. See the complete Shortlist <a href="http://www.ala.org/awardsgrants/carnegieadult/short-lists"> here.

I have mixed feelings about this book. It's always hard to judge someone's personal experience when rating a book so I can say that generally this was an interesting story. Her years growing up in her family certainly give good fodder for a story, albeit sometimes difficult to read. I think for me though, overall, I wasn't too enamoured by her focus on the more negative aspect of her mother's healing and the author's own seemingly limited stance on someone's ability to bloom at any age. I'll briefly address both of my reactions to these comments.

Natural healing. Her mother's reliance on God as the all-powerful healer and herbs as compliments to that are hard for me to swallow but that is her (mom's) personal view and not mine to argue. What I have a problem with is the author more or less giving us the impression that natural healing is based on her mother's experience. The author makes it sound kooky and woo woo when in fact, natural healing has many benefits and when used properly can be most effective. She often states that they used homeopathics and as a person who does practice homeopathy, I saw no real evidence of that in her stories. Bach Flowers perhaps and I know they used Rescue Remedy but nothing quite like traditional homeopathic remedies that I could tell. What bothers me most about this is not her view on natural healing, that is her's to have, but my concern as to the generalizations being made about natural healing and it's effectiveness when used responsibly.

Education. True, she had very little (if any) 'formal' schooling but what got me most was the surprise at how well she could do once she was in a situation to experience learning. As a homeschool parent, it was no surprise whatsoever that she was "able" to learn so well and so rapidly. Learning occurs at any age! There are no set boundaries as to when, how and what a person can learn. I understand she may have been surprised but the message is what gets me. Learning occurs at any age, no matter what your early circumstances. I consider myself a life long learner and I have never had a problem learning anything that I set my mind to learning. Once motivation strikes anyone can learn which was clearly evidenced by her desire to learn and the success that followed. That being said, yes her early educational circumstances were limited based on society's norm but as is shown again and again, she was able to learn anything she set her mind to once she had the motivation (and in this case, the opportunity). That is the true definition of education, at least in my experience.

So, despite these couple of sticking points which irritated me sufficiently, I think the writing overall was quite good and the story mostly engaging. Her repeatedly putting herself in certain situations was a bit difficult to read...over and over again.

There are some terrific books out there for people who prefer true stories. Tara Westover’s “Educated” shares her story of growing up in a poor Utah family of seven children who did not attend school, but rather worked with their father scrapping metals, a dangerous thing for young children to do. How Tara and some of her siblings ended up going to college and getting Ph.D.’s is astounding, and a tribute to the human spirit. I could not put this one down.

This was impossible to put down! I usually save my audio books for my car trips, but I found myself listening to this one at home. A story about Tara and her childhood growing up in a Mormon family. Her father was a survivalist and thought the world might end at any moment!

Their family home was situated in the shadow of Buck Peak mountain and they lived in poverty. Tara and her six siblings endured much pain under the volatile father and one brother who proved to be quite dangerous. The mother seemed to be in denial and turned the other cheek time and again.

Tara never attended school until the age of 17. She endured so much pain growing up with such a demanding and out of touch father. I was shocked at some of the life threatening situations she endured by having to work in her fathers metal scrapping business. The accidents were horrific.

Lots of reviews on this one, I thought it was both shocking and uplifting to read how Tara was able to pull herself out of the family chaos and become a successful woman.

Thanks to NG for my arc. I was able to read along with the audio.

When I reached the end of this book, I snapped as if I were at a poetry slam.

Tara Westover is brilliant. This book is a must-read.