"educated" by Tara Westover - a brief review

This autobiography, published last year, is very well written and I found it inspiring reading. It questions the importance of early education and up-bringing in achieving academic success. The author was born in Idaho in 1986. Her family lived in a rural area, and was dominated by her father, who was a fundamentalist Mormon with extreme ideas, even by his Mormon neighbours’ standards. Tara’s mother, also a Mormon, was a community midwife and herbalist. The state was so distrusted that the Westover children had no formal education. Conventional medical care, even for serious injuries, was shunned and Tara’s birth was not registered. Needless to say, the children were not vaccinated. Father made his living as a scrap metal dealer and builder of barns etc. He hoarded food and ammunition in anticipation of the imminent “End of Days”. In spite of this unpromising environment, and the abuse she experienced, Tara managed to educate herself, and to her credit, and that of a few academics who were open-minded enough to discount her unconventional upbringing, she got herself to Brigham Young University, enabling her to embark on an astonishingly successful academic career.

Lawrence Youlten