Ponder: Educated

Educated ©2018 by Tara Westover is a strong, very well-written book. This non-fiction memoir of a women raised in a survivalist Mormon family has accrued many accolades; a subset of them as listed in a Wikipedia entry for its author are

• Named the Book of the Year by the American Booksellers Association
• One of the New York Times's 10 Best Books of 2018
• Winner of the Goodreads Choice Award for Autobiography
• Amazon Editors' pick for the Best Book of 2018
• President Barack Obama's Favorite Books of the Year list
• Bill Gates's Holiday Reading list

First off, before addressing the content of the book I call attention to the cover art. The jacket illustration is by Swedish artist Patrik Svensson. I loved how he portrayed the mountain on which Tara Westover grew up as a the tip of a pencil. A sharpened No. 2 pencil screams school to me and recalls to me the line from the movie You've Got Mail, attributed to Nora Ephron, where Tom Hanks writes to Meg Ryan

Don't you love New York in the fall? It makes me wanna buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address.

Tara is the youngest of seven children: Tony, Shawn, Tyler, Luke, Audrey, Richard, Tara. Presumably being homeschooled, there is no dedicated time for study. They are often pulled from lessons or book-learning to work in the family's scrapping and junk yard business or else to stock up supplies (gasoline, ammunition, preserved foods) for when they must be totally self-sufficient at the point in time where the world about them "inevitably" disintegrates and ceases to function. Their parents permit no medical care for them other than the mother's herbal remedies, leaving their healing from sickness or a myriad of serious accidents "in God's hands". It is intimated that the father suffers from an undiagnosed bipolar disorder. The mother is subservient to the father. An older brother Shawn has violent tendencies. It is a wonder that Tara "escapes" this environment. Note here that my choice of word "escape" is in itself pejorative, as if I am insinuating superiority to a chosen life style.

Tara Westover, who never went to grade school or high school and never earned a GED (General Education Development) certificate was ultimately able to receive advanced higher education degrees: a BA from Brigham Young University, MPhil from Trinity College, a visiting fellow at Harvard, and a PhD in history from Cambridge. Was she able to do this without alienating her family? That is a struggle. A good, pious Morman woman's place is in the kitchen of her home tending to husband and children. Two of Tara's five brothers earned doctorates, Tyler and Richard. There is no memoirs for them to discern if their familial struggle as males was any less difficult.

This book haunted me in a way that I sought out other reviews on the book and supplemental information about the author and her family. There was a YouTube clip of Tara's visit on the Ellen Degeneres Show that gives good overview of the book. Interesting enough, Tara's brother Shawn and her brother Tyler each wrote contrasting reviews on Amazon. 

A YouTube conversation between Tara Westover and Bill Gates gave me true pause for thought. I have heard the divisiveness in the United States can be attributed to the conflict between "poorly educated" rural America and the "cluelessly educated" urban America. The "upset" in the 2016 presidential election was reputed to be a cry from struggling Americans in places like the rust belt to be heard. Tara Westover makes a statement in her conversation with Bill Gates that she thinks of "education as a great mechanism of connecting and equalizing but it can be a little frightening when education become an instrument of division." Not understanding the beliefs of those in a different socio-economic situation or different religious beliefs can be harmful to cohesiveness.

The writing style is easily absorbed, the true life characters are many-dimensional and engaging, the storyline is impressive, and the emotional involvement of the reader is inevitable. Based on quality, I have to reluctantly rate it five stars which in my personal  rating system translates to Great! Read it!. Why reluctantly? While reading it, I was appalled at some of the practices and injuries experienced by the characters; so, in all honesty, I cannot say I enjoyed Educated. 

• If you are reading for enlightenment or for probing mental stimulation, this book is a gem.
• If you are supremely curious what all the buzz about this book is, then definitely invest your time.
• If you are reading for a pure, pleasurable past-time, this memoir is too intense and heart-wrenching. 

I do not at all regret reading it, but I will admit that seeing the suffering of the siblings as well as that of the father and the mother was hard to take.