Review: Alone at the Summit Raised on an Idaho mountain by survivalists who kept her out of school, the author went on to earn a Ph.D. at Cambridge. Susan Wise Bauer reviews ‘Educated: A Memoir’ by Tara Westover. By Susan Wise Bauer
https://www.wsj.com/articles/review-alone-at-the-summit-1518813948
“Perhaps I’m simply hoping to find an answer that doesn’t exist—why some learners latch onto knowledge thirstily while others don’t; why a child with every opportunity for learning turns away in boredom, while another with nothing but an encyclopedia and the Book of Mormon catapults into the Ivy League. Without ever meaning to, “Educated” suggests something startling: Our children’s intellectual achievement may have almost nothing to do with the opportunities we provide them, and everything to do with some inborn drive that we can neither influence nor create. “
After growing up with a bipolar survivalist father, a damaged and treacherous mother, and an unstable, abusive older brother, Tara Westover finally developed the inner resources to walk away and adopt a new life.
Raised with absolutely no schooling until age 17, Tara Westover earned a scholarship to Cambridge University and a Ph.D in intellectual history and political thought.
These two stories are interwoven throughout “Educated,” Ms. Westover’s new memoir.
The author grows up on an Idaho mountain, one of seven children given no vaccinations or schooling (four of them don’t even have birth certificates). Her father claims to be a prophet, but sinks slowly into out-and-out mental illness—stockpiling ammunition, hoarding food and awaiting imminent apocalypse. Her mother suffers a traumatic brain injury in a car accident and never returns to normal functioning: Sometimes she protects young Tara from her violent older brother Shawn; sometimes she ignores Shawn’s attacks.
An occasional voice whispers to the author that this world is not normal—one of her grandmothers; a boy she meets in the nearby small town; her brother Tyler, who leaves home when she is 10. And so she makes her first effort to step outside of her parental realm, by telling her father that she wants to go to school. His rejection of this request is simple: “In this family, we obey the commandments of the Lord. You remember Jacob and Esau?”
Educated: A Memoir
By Tara Westover
Random House, 334 pages, $28
But Tara, like Tyler and another of her brothers (Richard, who hides behind the sofa to read the encyclopedia through from beginning to end), is irresistibly drawn toward learning. Dodging her father’s rages, alternately encouraged and slapped down by her mother, she teaches herself enough math and grammar by age 18 to enroll at Brigham Young University. Championed by one of her BYU professors, she is eventually admitted to a study-abroad program at Cambridge. The professor who directs her reading there is so impressed by her abilities (“pure gold,” he calls her) that he helps her apply to graduate school after she finishes BYU; Cambridge accepts her to read for a doctorate.
Meanwhile, her family life grows more erratic and terrifying. A visit home to Idaho ends with Shawn threatening to kill Tara with a knife, and Tara fleeing in a borrowed car, leaving her belongings behind. But both parents insist, afterward, that the horrific scene never happened: CONTINUE AT SITE
Comments are closed.
