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Kelsey Ford: From the Stacks: J. M. Ledgard's Submergence (0 comment)
Our blog feature, "From the Stacks," features our booksellers’ favorite older books: those fortuitous used finds, underrated masterpieces, and lesser known treasures. Basically: the books that we’re the most passionate about handselling. This week, we’re featuring Kelsey F.’s pick, Submergence by J. M. Ledgard...
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  • Kelsey Ford: Five Book Friday: Year of the Rabbit (0 comment)
  • Kelsey Ford: Powell's Picks Spotlight: Grady Hendrix's 'How to Sell a Haunted House' (0 comment)

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Educated: A Memoir

by Tara Westover
Educated: A Memoir

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ISBN13: 9780399590504
ISBN10: 0399590501
Condition: Standard
DustJacket: Standard

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Staff Pick

Educated tells both the story of how Tara Westover grew up, with no birth certificate, no formal schooling, living in rural Idaho, and how she left, not just physically, but how she reclaimed her mind, her view of the world, and her sense of self. It is unbelievable to me that someone could raise their children this way, and even more miraculous that several of them broke free. It is one thing to leave home, but entirely another to leave your family. Recommended By Mary Jo S., Powells.com

I don't know how to talk about this book yet. I've tried to explain how moved I was while reading it. How proud I am of Tara's journey so far. How haunted I feel by what she went through, and by the echoes of her experiences in my own life. I can't keep the tears out of my eyes and I can't praise Educated highly enough.  Recommended By McKenzie W., Powells.com

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments

An unforgettable memoir about a young girl who, kept out of school, leaves her survivalist family and goes on to earn a PhD from Cambridge University.

The New York Times Book Review’s Must-Know Literary Events of 2018
BBC’s Books Look Ahead 2018
Stylist’s 20 Must-Read Books to Make Room For in 2018
Entertainment Weekly’s 50 Most Anticipated Books of 2018
Bustle’s 13 Authors You Need to Be Watching in 2018
LibraryReads’s February Top 10
Daily Express’s Must-Have New Reads
The Pool’s Books We’re Looking Forward to in 2018
Vogue’s What to Read This Fall


Tara Westover was 17 the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her “head-for-the-hills” bag. In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged metal in her father’s junkyard.

Her father distrusted the medical establishment, so Tara never saw a doctor or nurse. Gashes and concussions, even burns from explosions, were all treated at home with herbalism. The 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 an older brother became violent.

When another brother got himself into college and came back with news of the world beyond the mountain, Tara decided to try a new kind of life. She taught herself enough mathematics, grammar, and science to take the ACT and was admitted to Brigham Young University. There, she studied psychology, politics, philosophy, and history, learning for the first time about pivotal world events like the Holocaust and the Civil Rights Movement. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge University. Only then would she wonder if she’d traveled too far, if there was still a way home.

Educated is an account of the struggle for self-invention. It is a tale of fierce family loyalty, and of the grief that comes from severing one’s closest ties. With the acute 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 one’s life through new eyes, and the will to change it.

Review

“Educated shines a light on a part of our country that we too often overlook. Tara Westover’s powerful tale — of trying to find a place for herself in the world, without losing her connection to her family or her beloved home — deserves to be widely read. My Mamaw would have been rooting for Tara.” J. D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy

Review

“This remarkable memoir — one of the best I’ve ever read — is my kind of miracle. The book made me cringe, cry out, cover my eyes, shake with anger, beam with pride, and appreciate the trials that led to my own education. Tara Westover’s story will find a place alongside modern classic memoirs like Wild and The Glass Castle. It’s that special.” Susannah Cahalan, author of Brain on Fire

Review

“Breathtaking, heart-wrenching, inspirational — I’ve never read anything like this. Educated is one of the best books, and Westover one of the most gifted writers, that I’ve read in a very long time.” Amy Chua, Yale law professor and author of Political Tribes and Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

Review

“A punch to the gut, a slow burn, a savage indictment, a love letter...Rarely have I read a book that made me so uncomfortable, so enraged, and at the same time so utterly, entirely absorbed.” Claire Dederer, author of Love and Trouble

About the Author

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 PhD in history in 2014. Educated is her first book.

Tara Westover on PowellsBooks.Blog

IMG: Tara Westover I was raised in the mountains of Idaho by a father who opposed many of the institutions that most people take for granted — public education, doctors and hospitals, the government. As a result I was never put in school, never visited a doctor or nurse, and was not given a birth certificate until age nine...

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Average customer rating 5 (9 comments)

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techeditor , November 21, 2022 (view all comments by techeditor)
In EDUCATED, Tara Westover first describes the circumstances she grew up in. Her father was a survivalist who did not trust the government. So he didn't do things like register his cars or send his kids to public schools. Westover's mother made a stab at home schooling her seven children, but, to say the least, it was inadequate. Luckily, Westover's older brother taught her to read. Her father was also careless with his family's safety and didn't trust doctors or hospitals. So, when they were hurt, often as a result of his carelessness, the family depended on their mother's homeopathic remedies, even for severe burns and head injuries. With this background, Westover sought education, beginning with Brigham Young University. She had never even gone to high school much less graduated. But she got in when she was 16 after (pretty much) teaching herself enough to pass the ACT. She soon discovered how ignorant she was of even the most well-known history such as the Holocaust and Martin Luther King's civil rights movements. But she learned as much as she could on her own and ended up impressing her professors enough to continue her education in spite of not being able to afford it. Throughout the years she devoted to her education, Westover made annual trips to her home in Idaho. She wanted her parents' approval, but her father and, therefore, her mother insisted she was siding with the devil and needed to stop sinning and accept their reality, not hers.

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Weems , December 19, 2020 (view all comments by Weems)
The most compelling aspect of this memoir to me was the experience of cultish thinking, the control and debasement wielded in a family and the difficult process of extracting oneself from its chains. Westover’s story, her extraction despite her good fortune and opportunities, helps us understand how helpless many may without such good fortune, how obeisance proves less dangerous. That even hatred isn’t the key, but perspective. Wisdom. Education. Why else would teachers and schools that hold themselves to standards of logic and humanity be high on the hitlist of fascist conservatives and despots?

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Cristina , November 01, 2018
Fantastic book. Great insight into self discovery, and to unpacking memories, traumas, joy and life all together. A brilliant writer with a fascinating story. I highly suggest this book!

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writermala , August 22, 2018 (view all comments by writermala)
Tara Westover's "educated" is by far the best book I have read in a long time. I couldn't believe that this was a memoir and not fiction.Tara Westover grew up in rural Idaho in a family of fundamental Mormons, with no Birth Certificate, no Schooling, and no medical attention to speak of. She helps her father in his junk yard but yearns for learning. She tries to pass the ACT test and her first introduction to education is when she learns that the "skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read the things I could not understand." Her instincts are her guardians in the rough life she leads.Journalizing keeps Tara sane and in her journal she writes the line, "Emancipate yourself from mental slavery." She seems to pick up the essence of everything she reads and learns for example when she writes in all her notebooks and blank spaces the words, "None but ourselves can free our minds." It is only when she hears the fact that "Of the nature of women, nothing final can be known," that she feels free. By dint of hard work, Tara rises to heights no person brought up like she did, can aspire, by getting a PhD. While she gets an education, Tara battles all kinds of emotions from her excommunication from her family mainly guilt. She finally learns that guilt is never about "them"."Guilt is the fear of of one's own wretchedness." If there is only one book you read this year please let this be the one.

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fancigram , May 29, 2018
I can hardly wait to read "Education"! I struggled with barriers to education, also, but none as horrible as the author. As a social worker, my heart and energy has focused on encouraging girls and women to reach for education! I explain how it took me nearly 20 years to complete my BA, with a class here and there, as often as I could put money and time together. My MASTER'S thesis research was on "Resiliency in Children", following children of teen moms, whom had survived many challenges to become successful, whole, and contributing persons. Giving hope to others, is the best gift of all!

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Mark , March 27, 2018
Searing and brilliant memoir of a young woman raised in a rural Idaho home ruled by a domineering, seemingly half-mad patriarch who lives a life grounded in radically fundamental beliefs coupled with a deep paranoia of government and modernity. Her life, cut off from the conventional world, is rich with experience and challenges, yet disconnected from formal schooling and, apart from church, any meaningful involvement with the other institutions of society. She is deeply connected to her close family, but is exposed to dangerous work, an aggressive and abusive brother, a co-dependent mother and a father who defies easy description. Out of this extreme isolation she manages to nurture a deep curiosity and with time is able to slowly unravel the web of control that has limited her existence to a narrow and hard place. Her tenacity, hope, and resilience in the face of abuse and rejection is phenomenal and her difficult, sometimes anguished path to the outside world is fraught with numerous setbacks. Yet despite incalculable odds, she leaves for college, essentially self-educated, to find herself in the world of books, ideas, and guided by gentle mentors finds eventual freedom, but not without great personal cost. This is the best memoir I have read in recent memory.

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Nancy London , March 24, 2018 (view all comments by Nancy London)
Riveting. The author grew up in fundamentalist Mormon family, scraping metal in her father's junk yard. She had never attended school, never seen a doctor. As a young adult, her education brings into question everything she was raised to believe. And when as an adult she confronts her abusive older brother, the family rejects her, saying she is possessed of the devil. A powerful book about how we deny what we know in order to keep the love we need.

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SeattleBookMama , March 01, 2018 (view all comments by SeattleBookMama)
Tara Westover’s memoir is the story of one woman’s journey from a fundamentally loving yet untenable home life, to the civilized world she has been raised to fear. Each chapter focuses on one meaningful event in the author’s life, and it’s told with sensitivity, grace, and yes, also a sprinkling of rage, because how can she not? But all told, Westover permits the balm of time and distance to balance her perspective. This book is going to be read for a very long time.I received my copy of Educated free and early, thanks to Random House and Net Galley. Westover grows up in a large family that is nominally Mormon (Latter Day Saints, or LDS), but she and her siblings are denied the tight-knit communal bond that most members of that faith experience. Their father is deeply suspicious of the outside world including other church members, and as his pathology grows, they are increasingly isolated. Basic social expectations such as personal hygiene and clean clothing; inoculations against deadly diseases; a birth certificate; and an understanding of how to navigate within the greater society are denied her, as Dad’s survivalist views kick into gear.Veteran teachers like me are fascinated by remarkable young people like Westover that experience horror after horror exponentially and yet somehow, with little external assistance, they are able to claw themselves free of the rubble and become high achievers. Get this book. You won’t be sorry, and at the end of it, you’re almost guaranteed to look at your own family in a gentler light.

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bugzna2000 , February 23, 2018 (view all comments by bugzna2000)
This memoir about growing up in a radical family of religious fundamentalists on a remote Idaho mountain is stunning. A father who runs a scrapyard, an herbalist midwife mother and 7 children birthed at home are living completely off the grid. Tara did not see the inside of a classroom before the age of 17 because her paranoid parents did not believe in public education. They believed schooling was a plot by government to brainwash. This survivalist family spent entire summers canning food and preparing in other ways for Armageddon. Despite the abusive world she grew up in, Tara ultimately rebels, going away to college and achieves a Phd from Harvard. Her world opens up beyond her family’s distorted reality; She is an inspiration. There was so much Tara shared that hurt my heart. I cannot comprehend growing up in this kind of dysfunctional atmosphere. What a brave soul for sharing such intimate details of her family life. I devoured this book and can’t recommend enough!

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Product Details

ISBN:
9780399590504
Binding:
Hardcover
Publication date:
02/20/2018
Publisher:
PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE
Pages:
352
Height:
1.20IN
Width:
6.30IN
Copyright Year:
2018
Author:
Tara Westover

Ships free on qualified orders.
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List Price:$28.00
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