I just finished reading the book Educated by Tara Westover.

About the author: Tara Westover is an American author. Raised in Idaho by a father who opposed public education, she never attended school. She spent her days working in her family’s junkyard or stewing herbs for her mother, a self-taught herbalist and midwife. She set foot in a classroom at the age of seventeen. After that, she pursued learning for a decade, graduating magna cum laude from Brigham Young University and subsequently winning a Gates Cambridge Scholarship. In 2014 she earned a PhD in history from Trinity College, Cambridge, and currently she is a senior research fellow at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard. Educated is her first book. 

Reading about the author is reason enough to read this memoir.

This is what Bill Gates had to say about the book: “I thought I was pretty good at teaching myself—until I read Tara Westover’s memoir Educated. Her ability to learn on her own blows mine right out of the water. ”  Link to Bill Gate’s conversation with Tara Westover.

It is an inspiring book about how in spite of all odds, Tara escapes her past and progresses into the future; however leaving us with a question about whether we can actually cut ourselves free from our past.

The book also gives a good insight into why and how people put up with abuse. They put up with it either because they don’t know any better or because putting up with it is the easy way out. Acknowledging a problem comes with the responsibility of finding a solution to it. Often times it is easier to pretend there is no problem. We brush aside abuse as a one-off incident or shift the blame to the abusee and his/her provocation. In Tara’s story, her brother Shawn is abusive and her family members turn a blind eye to it for as long as they could.

Education should make us open minded enough to accept that there are people and beliefs that are very different from ours and help us understand that humanity is beyond all these differences. That should be the role of any kind of education, formal or informal.

Educated by Tara Westover  is a beautiful affirmation of how we can break every barrier and overcome every situation with the sheer will to do so.

I highly recommend reading this book.

My next pick to read is-The Giver Of Stars by Jojo Moyes. Yes, the same author who wrote Me Before You- the movie adaptation of which made most of us use up an entire tissue box . I can’t wait to get deep into it.

Is there a book that you recently read and would recommend? Please let me know in the comment section.

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