Isolation and Reinvention Are Explored in Educated: A Memoir

Growing up isolated in the mountains of Idaho, formal education was absent from Tara Westover’s childhood. By sheer willpower, she overcame the survivalist mentality of her tight-knit family and earned a PhD from the University of Cambridge. Her story of how she reinvented herself reveals brutally honest accounts of a family, who never saw a doctor and fiercely resisted outside help, even when her older brother became violent. Readers of Jeanette Weaver’s The Glass Castle and J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy will find similar themes to explore.

—Contributed by Rose Ryan, librarian, Hennepin County Library – Maple Grove