Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Education is more than just books. (But books sure help.)

Educated by Tara Westover

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I picked this up knowing the broad strokes: rural girl in highly religious community and no formal education per se claws her way into and through the education system, to eventually receive a PhD.  That’s right, broadly.  But this memoir is not just about “book learning”: it’s about learning about your family, and learning that there are many ways to have a life, learning how to trust yourself when it seems like everyone else has given up on you, and learning to nurture your own […]

“We are all of us more complicated than the roles we are assigned in the stories other people tell”

Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover

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A couple of months ago I read American Like Me and focused my review on how the various contributors wrote and reflected on the way their lives hopped boundaries or existed on the edge of multiple cultures. In Educated Tara Westover is doing a deep dive of her own, very personal, journey of leaving one culture (that of her father) and exploring the cultures of more mainstream Mormonism and mainstream America. It is not a perfect book, and to my mind Westover chose an interesting […]

We don’t need no education, we don’t need no thought control

Educated by Tara Westover

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In the middle of rural Idaho, born and raised At the junkyard is where she spends all of her days Sorting out scrap and following Mormon rules And avoiding government institutions like hospitals and schools It looks like she’s in for a life of abuse Then her world gets flip-flopped upside down When she gets into college out of town Although a Fresh Prince riff feels a little glib for the often dark parts of Tara Westover’s memoir, at base her story shares some similarities- […]

…and then I creeped their entire family on Facebook.

Educated by Tara Westover

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I added this as an impulse buy to an Amazon order because I kept seeing it pop up on so many “Best of 2018” lists. And for good reason. As many others have said, this book is phenomenal. Educated is Westover’s memoir; her story of growing up in an extreme, fanatical, Mormon household (no one was permitted to see a doctor, children weren’t enrolled in school, half of the kids didn’t even have birth certificates, etc). She eventually escapes from this life and goes on to […]

“My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs.”

Educated by Tara Westover

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Educated is a force of nature. There is very little I can say here that hasn’t been said already, and probably more eloquently, but Tara Westover’s memoir about growing up the daughter of Mormon survivalists in Idaho was one of the best books I read in 2019. Oh, it is only January 6th? Nah, I stand by it. Educated felt like a combination between The Glass Castle and Beyond Belief while still remaining in a class all its own. “It happens sometimes in families: one child who doesn’t fit, […]

Everybody effing read this.

Educated by Tara Westover

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“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 […]



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