Let’s Get EDUCATED

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Because we live in crazy times, my BS meter is on high alert. So recently, at a neighborhood dinner, when a woman I did not know said that Irish slavery occurred in bigger numbers in the US than African slavery—I had to bite my tongue. In retrospect, there were two words I could have said, but failed to—indentured servant. Yes, the Irish took that on in great numbers, but that’s not slavery, that’s not being dragged from your home, chained almost naked in the bottom of a ship and whipped if you don’t comply. NO COMPARISON.

Being told lies to control a population is not a new thing—think Nazi Germany. That’s why I think Tara Westover’s book, EDUCATED, has sprung to the top of the charts. In remembering her childhood and the lies her father told her, in letting us see her life as she believed it was and then how she managed to EDUCATE herself, Westover is a modern hero.

Here is the review I wrote for Goodreads. I’d add this book to your must read list or ask someone to get it for you as a holiday gift.

Westover takes us into a world that is frightening in its composition and isolation. Her father, who believes in some aspects of the Mormon faith, has isolated his family on a mountain in Idaho. The family is a large one, Westover’s mother becoming a midwife to help others in the community birth their children without the help of a hospital or doctors with degrees in medicine. This negative attitude toward anything that I, as a midwesterner growing up in a community of doctors, lawyers and teachers and business people, cannot begin to imagine.

Westover’s father has the last say on everything and has chosen to absent himself from the social concepts most Americans take for granted: education, medicine, freedom to practice religion ie Christian, Jewish or your choice; also trusting banks and the government. She is not allowed to go to school and often finds herself working in a junk yard that her father considers his business–doing work that risks her physical body–not to mention her very soul.

But Westover is smart and slowly begins to see there is a wider world beyond the mountain of Bucks Peak. This is a memoir of growth and escape, of moving forward and falling back, until the sheer power of her intellect and her realization that members of her family might even kill her propels her to a positive end.

Yes, it’s only her point of view–how she delineates this family. But it is one we all need to realize could be one of many, that there are probably children right this moment suffering as she did.



So consider this book. Two of my book clubs are reading it. Also:



P.S. Books are great gifts. So is kindly opening the eyes of others to understanding and empathy.

P.S. Another review from Arts and Culture.   Here.

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