Aloha readers!
It has been a little while since we reviewed a biography and we know there are readers out there who especially love biographies!
If you loved “The Glass Castle,” then you will love this book as well!
For most of us, a formal education is an assumed part of life as much as having air to breathe.
But for some people, even in our modern societies, education is prevented or not allowed at all, and author Tara Westover, in her newly released autobiography entitled “Educated,” helps us to see through her experiences that this can be a form of abuse in and of itself.
Tara Westover was denied an education while growing up in an incredibly extreme family situation on many levels. She was born to survivalists in the Idaho mountains, completely out of contact with our everyday world, without access to medicines, education, and help at all.
At the age of 17, she escaped her family and, after discovering the world most of us know, taught herself the basic education we take for granted. Eventually, by her own effort, she graduated with a Ph.D. from Cambridge University.
Both gripping and provocative, “Educated” will keep you engrossed from the very beginning and doesn’t let go until you have finished the book.
This is a powerful memoir of Westover’s experience of her own real life family drama. Most people could not relate to the extremes off what Westover experienced and yet we find to share some of the feelings she experienced in her very dysfunctional family in one way or another, which we think might make this autobiography quite universal.
Part of the challenge of reading this story is knowing that the family dynamic the author grew up in still exists and is a heartbreaking continuing saga for the ones who have not escaped.
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Cynthia Lynn and Ed Justus are owners of The Bookstore in Hanapepe.
