Educated

Educated by Tara Westover is one of the most extraordinary memoirs of the century. Westover grew up in the mountains of rural Idaho in a survivalist family led by a bipolar father who distrusted government, medicine, and public schools. She worked in her family’s junkyard, survived accidents and abuse, and had no formal education until she taught herself enough to pass the ACT at seventeen. What followed was a journey through Brigham Young University, Cambridge University, and Harvard that required her to question everything she had been taught to believe. Westover’s writing is visceral, measured, and searingly honest as she grapples with the cost of education not just academic knowledge, but self-knowledge and what it means to choose between family loyalty and truth.