Goldmine Reads

This book summary and analysis was created for individuals who want to extract the essential contents and are too busy to go through the full version. This book is not intended to replace the original book. Instead, we highly encourage you to buy the full version.

Tara Westover was seventeen when she started her formal education. Being born into a survivalist family in the mountainous Idaho, she spent her childhood helping out scrapping metal in her father’s junkyard and assisting her mother who was a midwife and an herbalist. She never saw a doctor or a teacher because her family never believed in modern medicine and in the school system. Despite her family being a magnet for accidents from gashes to burns to explosions and crashes, all of these were treated at home with her mother’s herbs.

Their family had become isolated from the constraints of society but had been controlled by their father’s extreme worldviews. This had propelled Tara’s brother to pursue education so that he could leave their home and, because of this, Tara herself was inspired to teach herself to do the same. She studied enough to be able to pass the ACT and get into Brigham Young University and, while there, she was able to learn about psychology, history, politics, philosophy, and the pivotal events around the world that she never knew before. Because of this endless curiosity and thirst for learning, she was able to get into Harvard and into Cambridge—and this had all transformed her into who she is today.

Educated is the story of a girl’s struggle for balance between learnings about life and her family’s worldviews. From her loyalty to and love for her family to the need of severing these same ties, this memoir takes into account the value there is in self-invention. Westover’s coming-of-age tale portrays the true meaning of an education and what comes after it, from the eyes of a child changing and transforming through each experience.

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