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This giveaway is closed———Rules: U.S. only/ Share your mailing address with me, so I can mail the book to you/ Tag a friend who enjoys books/ Use “Educated” for the randomizer/ Winner must post a thanks post when book is received/ Be nice and be merry. Good luck! Giveaway closes sometimes this weekend. Book will be shipped on Monday. Edit: This is a brand new book. I meant to buy one, but purchased two copies by mistake. Instead of returning it, decided to host my first giveaway.
Thanks for recs in advance
Edit:
List of Recs Mentioned Thus Far
- Mike Massimino - Spaceman
- Anne Glenconner - Lady in Waiting (especially if you are a fan of The Crown)
- Samantha Power - The Education of an Idealist
- Colin Jost - A Very Punchable Face
- JB West - Upstairs at the White House
- Ben Rich - Skunk Works
- Andre Agassi - Open
- Furiously Happy - Jenny Lawson
- The Mother of Black Hollywood - Jennifer Lewis
- 10% Happier - Dan Harris
- Becoming Superman - jms
- “Wham! George Michael and Me” - Andrew Ridgeley
I just finished this and only read it until the very end so I can hate it completely. Goodreads review it like some gold nugget of a book. I not only found it badly written and as a memoir a complete and utter piece of BS.
For a Ph.D. from such prestigious schools, I would expect this book to be better written. It just repeats itself, events are depicted always in the same way. Just a one-trick poney so to speak. As for content well, I read fantasy fiction authors that didn't have this much imagination. First, a picture is painted of absolute destitution and then there is a phone, cable tv, internet, and money for college and boarding. So many injuries that would be hard enough to recuperate from in a hospital are treated with thoughts and prayers and some herbs sprinkled in. Magical self-learning where someone with less than the basics teaches all by themselves high school curriculum and keeps acing all exams and tests.
I can suspend my disbelief only as far as the first brain injury, after that this just reads like some awful fantasy from someone that wants to look like an overachiever.
Am I the only one? For every one that liked it, did you really believe the story?
Anything welcome! I’ve read Glass Castle, which is a popular one to recommend! I love grounded stories about people and their life experiences, so anything in that category would be amazing! Fiction, nonfiction, memoirs, etc.. Thanks so much!
My discord book club is reading Educated by Tara Westover in our Non-Fiction book club and I wanted to invite you to join us if you're interested. We'll be reading it throughout the month of August and it's read-at-your-own pace, so you can read it as fast or as slow as you like and just post your thoughts as you go.
You can find us here: https://discord.gg/KgFF9j3GTh
I imagine a lot of you have already read it, but if not I HIGHLY recommend it. We also recently read Pure by Linda Kay Klein if you're interested in discussing that.
- the story of how tyler decided to leave the mountain is a strange one, full of gaps and twists. It happens sometimes in families; one child who doesn't fit, whose rhythm is off, whose meter is set to the wrong tune.
- Tyler stood to go. “There’s a world out there, Tara,” he said. “And it will look a lot different once Dad is no longer whispering his view of it in your ear.
- You can love someone and still choose to say goodbye to them,” she says now. “You can miss a person every day, and still be glad that they are no longer in your life.
- The thing about having a mental breakdown is that no matter how obvious it is that you're having one, it is somehow not obvious to you. I'm fine, you think. So what if I watched TV for twenty-four straight hours yesterday. I'm not falling apart. I'm just lazy. Why it's better to think yourself lazy than think yourself in distress, I'm not sure. But it was better. More than better: it was vital.
- It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you, I had written in my journal. But Shawn had more power over me than I could possibly have imagined. He had defined me to myself, and there’s no greater power than that.
- Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind. This was the price I was being asked to pay, I understood that now. What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me.
- The decisions I made after that moment were not the ones she would have made. They were the choices of a changed person, a new self.
You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal.
I call it an education
- The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand.
- I began to experience the most powerful advantage of money: the ability to think of things besides money.
- This is a magical place,” I said. “Everything shines here.” “You must stop yourself from thinking like that,” Dr. Kerry said, his voice raised. “You are not fool’s gold, shining only under a particular light. Whomever you be
... keep reading on reddit ➡Took decades for me to stumble onto the concept of Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and then the Cultic Religious Trauma Syndrome version of it.
Educated describes pretty much exactly how I found my way out of the conditioning, in-doctrine-ation, instruction, imprinting, socialization, habituation and normalization to the awful Learned Helplessness, Dread & the Victim Identity I tried to run away from with sex, drugs and rock & roll for soooo long.
I didn't get to go Harvard and Cambridge like TW, but I did get to go through a graduate program that was more than good enough to set me up to Get The Job Done about a decade before Educated was published. And thanks to books like hers and others, as well as forums like this one (and others on Reddit, very much including r/exchristian) along with Rick Alan Ross's Cult Education Institute and the rest of the useful resources listed below, my sincere hope is that millions of others won't have to do what she and I did just to break out of the prisons we were raised in.
Cult Awareness & Information Center
Freedom of Mind (Steve Hassan’s deal)
[International C
... keep reading on reddit ➡...and I'd love more like it! I don't usually read memoirs, but this was compared to "The Glass Castle", and I devoured / adored both.
I'd love recommendations based "Educated," as I'm usually a sci-fi / fantasy reader.
Thanks, and thank all y'all for such an awesome sub!
looking for something that hits similar emotional beats :)
In her book "Educated" Tara claims that when she first looked at the ACT study guide she didn't know what ANY of the math symbols were. None of them. She scans the first page and doesn't understand the symbols. "What's this?" she asks Mother. "Math," says Mother.
And in just a short while she teaches herself advanced mathematics, and essentially aces the ACT? Does better than nearly all her cohorts who have been taking math since 6 years old? And despite this clear genius for mathematics she essentially drops the subject to study history?
Color me very skeptical. I found this comment here which is think is enlightening.
>I don't know what the family's attorney would say other than don't take Tara Westover's account at face value. That said, her brother (can't remember the name but it was the one she considered a particular ally) had a blog up at one point. He disputed many of her claims about how isolated they were and what the quality of the home education they actually got was.
>He has since taken that blog down but one point he made has stayed with me. While I am now as inclined to take his account with a grain of salt as I am Tara's and her parents' lawyer's, the undisputed fact is that 3 of those kids went on -- from the same circumstances -- to get PhDs. In light of that I think you have to wonder how singular she is and what contributed to that quest for scholarship was that she wasn't completely honest in acknowledging.
>Her achievement is hers to be proud of. But I think there is reason to suspect her motives and, perhaps, her failure to be candid about the family's more constructive contributions to her success.
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/19457527-do-you-think-it-is-true
Three PhDs in one family and they all had piss poor bare bones education with ZERO math? Nope, again, cannot buy that.
I am not saying her account is "fake" or the next million little pieces. But she seems to have exaggerated some claims and it makes it hard to take it all very literally.
Spoilers for the book.
I made it half way through this audio book before I realized the chaotic life this girl was leading was a true story. The part I really want to talk about is the end portion of the memoir. But before I get into that:
The author has a writing style that distills moments of terror to their basic essence, and she does it without emotional frivolity. She's not agonizing over the past. She's telling you what happened. I wasn't raised by a parent with Bipolar Disorder, but this author perfectly described the mentality, the emotions, I experienced growing up under a borderline queen. She put to words the subtle essence of living in fear and convincing yourself you feel nothing. She spoke the twisted thoughts I heard echo in my own head when I was a child. She understood the rules. She understood.
The end of the book (when she realizes her sister was also abused by their older brother) was when I felt cold realization that this author lived another of my experiences. I thought I had found an ally that validated the memories I myself doubted. I thought my sister had broken through the FOG.
No one ever broke my wrist, or denied me an education, but I had a sister that confided in me when our uBPDmom verbally tore her apart in a fit of rage A sister that wanted to be my ally... until it was inconvenient to go against the family. The moment when Tara realized she was again alone (because of her sister's abandonment) perfectly reflected my own. Just like my experience, it didn't immediately occur to Tara that her sister stopped being her ally. She takes a moment to assess what was just said, and eventually understands what the evidence means. It always took me a few seconds to process the moment my sister revealed she had betrayed my trust to the woman who abused us both. Betrayed my confidence to save herself.
Tara Westover had some poignant quotes I wanted to share here. I started bookmarking passages like crazy towards the end of the book. I agonized over the realization that what just happened was Tara's fellow abuse survivor--her sister--her ally had recanted her truth and blamed Tara for being wrong. But Tara doesn't blame her sister. She doesn't even seem surprised when it happens again with her brother, and she reflects.
"This was the moment I had lost Audrey. This was the moment the costs had become real. When the tax was levied. The rent due. This was the moment [Audrey] had realized how much easier it was to walk away. What
... keep reading on reddit ➡Just finished reading a memoir Educated by Tara Westeover and it was a good read. It had been a long time since I read an amazing writing. Trust me, Tara is an amazing story teller. She has beautifully explained the struggle she faced to get her education amidst being born in a conservative family and in the end shown how she, and her brothers who left Idaho, lives changed because of the quality education they got.
Was just recommended to read this book. Anyone read it and can tell me if it's good or if it's gonna be something telling me to go to church?
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news but from this day onward none of us have an excuse for bad grades anymore
After noticing all the hype surrounding this book, I decided I had to read it. I was hoping to be moved, to appreciate the value of education in my life (it did happen to a certain extent). While the theme was consistent, the book largely dealt with the author's memories of her childhood and teenage years (the book is fairly graphic in its descriptions).
The start was slow but once I was invested in the story, it was hard to put the book down. The conclusion felt a little lukewarm and sudden. It made me wonder if the author should've waited a few more years before penning this memoir. Nonetheless, it is her story and she made her choice. I enjoyed the book, but something felt amiss when it comes to the connection between the theme, the writing and the narrative. Can't quite put my finger on it.
How did you like the book, and if you haven't read it, why would you consider/not consider reading it?
Received this as a gift, but I have it already. I am willing to ship within the continental US.
I am currently three quarters of the way through this book and I'm really enjoying Tara's insight into the human mind and also the insight she has into her own thought patterns and live experiences. I find she seems to have a level of self awareness few others achieve.
I'm interested into what takeaways others have taken from this book and if others have noticed this awareness.
Thanks
Edit: I felt compelled to finish it last night, so I was up until the early hours. I just couldn't stop myself. The problem now is I've finished it. I hate having to start a new book
Anyone else read Educated and think about Cody’s family the whole time? The parallels are definitely there. The divining rods and other pseudoscience, the far-right conspiracies, the physical danger he puts his children in, the “home schooling.”
I sincerely hope Jack and his sister are one day able to see through their parents fears.
I've been very into stories about young women coming into their own in the face of adversity lately (Where the Crawdads sing, The Great Alone) and so naturally Educated was on my list.
Everything I read in this book is absolutely heartwrenching, and the way she just describes these things with such simplicity as though it was the most normal thing. My god I keep reminding myself that this is non-fiction and it just puts all of the teen angst I had towards my parents into perspective.
What a great read. Call and thank your parents today!
Tara Westover, author of the highly acclaimed memoir, “Educated” which details her experience growing up in Idaho with Mormon survivalist parents, is presenting a free virtual lecture through Utah Valley University tomorrow.
Here’s a link to the details and ticket information. The Good Book Club, a reading group for post and nuanced Mormons, will be reading “Educated” for their December discussion.
https://uvu.universitytickets.com/w/event.aspx?id=3122&r=a854902518fb4dfc818a022fe8bb1931&fbclid=IwAR39snXPR17OsO2ZlkikQlT4WaAUI_Bw6310pCimIM6WT2rq9JCSmELIXi0
Has anyone else read this book and had a lot of strong feelings?
I am looking for book similar to “Educated” by Tara Westover. It is to date one of my favorite books and I am looking for more like it.
Anyone read the book Educated by Tara Westover and gasp at all the similarities between your nparent and her father? I was gripped by this book because of all the similarities
So it's basically Jill Duggar's life, no?
