Educated

Educated written by Tara Westover is by far the best book I’ve read this year. Well written, superbly structured, interesting, riveting, and just, you know, a damn good book – which just happens to be a true story. No wonder Bill Gates says about the book: ‘Educated is even better than you’ve heard’. I agree with him and with all the other reviewers that are all in awe of this outstanding piece of work.

Set in rural Idaho in the mid-nineties, Educated is Tara’s story of her brave journey towards knowledge and enlightenment – and her wildly improbable goal of becoming educated.

She grows up with an extremist father who spends his life preparing for the ‘End of Days’ – forcing his family to join him in his quest – storing fuel in huge tanks underground, rotating emergency supplies, keeping bottled fruit and canned food in a bunker, and so forth. All of this in order to be ready for when the world as we know it fails, and to ensure that his family will continue unaffected.

Tara’s birth is never registered, she never sets foot in a school, and has neither school nor medical records. In fact, according to the federal state, Tara does not exist. The most jaw dropping aspect about the whole thing is that this did not take place in the dark ages, but a mere thirty years ago.

Tara spends her youth scrapping for her father or preparing herbal remedies for her mother’s alternative medicine business. By age sixteen, circumstances at home become extreme to the point of being dangerous and Tara realises she has no choice but to leave.

Her journey towards knowledge takes her from her beloved Idaho mountains across oceans and continents to a world she never knew existed, including the campuses of Cambridge and Harvard where she ultimately, and miraculously, attains her PHD at age 26 after ten years of studying.

It is a story about family, about belonging and about how much one sacrifices to be loved and accepted. It is an account of how she is forced to exit her secluded upbringing and face the world to try and find her own place in it. Something she realises is only achieved through the perspective granted by education, and her subsequent relentless pursuit of it.

It is a gift to read her moving and thought-provoking story. Don’t miss it.