Educated: A Memoir

Choose the good

The midwife

Cream shoes

Apache women

Honest dirt

Shield and buckler

The Lord will provide

Tiny harlots

Perfect in his generations

Shield of feathers

Instinct

Fish eyes

Silence in the churches

My feet no longer touch Earth

No more a child

Disloyal man, disobedient heaven

To keep it holy

Blood and feathers

In the beginning

Recitals of the fathers

Skullcap

What we whispered and what we screamed

I'm from Idaho

A knight, errant

The work of sulphur

Waiting for moving water

If I were a woman

Pygmalion

Graduation

The hand of the almighty

Tragedy then farce

A brawling woman in a wide house

Sorcery of physics

The substance of things

West of the sun

Four long arms, whirling

Gambling for redemption

Family

Watching the buffalo

Educated.

"Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her "head-for-the-hills bag." In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged in her father's junkyard. The family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education, and no one to intervene when one of Tara's older brothers became violent. As a way out, Tara began to educate herself, learning enough mathematics and grammar to be admitted to Brigham Young University. Her quest for knowledge would transform her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge. Only then would she wonder if she'd traveled too far, if there was still a way home. With the acute insight that distinguishes all great writers, Tara Westover has crafted a universal coming-of-age story that gets to the heart of what an education offers: the perspective to see one's life through new eyes, and the will to change it."

Provided by publisher.