I took it out of the YM library on the Friday before March Break began; I started it on the streetcar ride over to the Horse Palace Friday evening. I read it all day yesterday. I finished it this morning – it’s Monday.

I don’t normally read so quickly. Something propelled me through “Educated” by Tara Westover even though it’s actually really difficult to read. Not the words – they are beautiful and haunting. The pain of the book is hard; she experienced physical pain working in the family junkyard under her misguided father and being abused by her brother. She survived the emotional trauma of living in a Mormon family where fear of government overrode safety, health and well-being.

The book is about education in its multiple forms; she didn’t go to formal school as a child in Idaho but she was still educated even in not being formally educated. Her parents’ pious and rigid views influenced her, even infected her, I’d say. Tara Westover’s book is the journey to reclaim where she starts and they end. Formal education is part of her reclamation process as she has studied at BYU, Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard.

But it’s education in life that has really saved her; learning to unlearn, learning to accept, learning to see through a different lens.

We can all learn from that in these troubled, polarizing times.