I found this book extraordinary, and captivating. I read the reviews from her two brothers where they tried to explain their parents paranoia and distrust of the government. The father was thought to have schizophrenic and bipolar tendencies and the mother went along with anything he wanted. However, it was she who made their family millionaires with herbal medicines she created.

Tara's rise above her family's negativism was astonishing as she had to put her family behind her. Two brothers reached out but not her parents. Her impressive education earned many awards plus a Ph.D from Cambridge.

I could not put this book down until finished. It is a story that will stay with me for a long time.

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Tara Westover is the daughter of a bipolar, Morman who doesn't believe in the government or modern medicine and throws scrapyard metal from his business without determining if his children are in the way--all because God will provide. This is Tara's story of how she taught herself enough to qualify for college and then went on to study at Cambridge and Harvard. It's also the story of how she sought to emotionally extricate herself from this family with the help of her brother. It truly is an insight into foreign cultures, mental illness, and how they influence society and the individual. She is an excellent writer!

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Educated is an eye opener. I was so taken with the story of Tara's life that I did a little research once I'd finished the book & discovered her parents' natural oils, etc. business is a huge & well-known one & that her mom has retaliated with a book of her own. If Tara's story wasn't true, her mom wouldn't have written a book - she have filed a lawsuit. I believe Tara's story.

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Excellent writing and incredible story based on fact.

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An amazing story of a woman, with no formal education makes it to a PhD in spite of a brutal upbringing by Mormon fanatics. More proof of the destructive power of people that cant and wont think but just want to follow.

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Whew...Very difficult reading about her life. It's hard to understand unless you have walked a mile in her shoes. But I would think each time she had to confront her family, things would have been different. Daughter in a large family of strict religious Mormons growing up in Utah. Barely home schooled at all by her mother, and determined to break away and get herself "educated". This is based on her memoirs, and her whole life and that of her siblings was one heartbreak after another. Tyrannical, religious father, submissive mother, and obviously mental illness running in her family. Mostly the brainwashing that went on was difficult to understand. I need an easy breezy beach read now!

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In a memoir reminiscent of Jeanette Walls' "The Glass Castle", Westover tells of growing up in a profoundly dysfunctional family where probable mental illness is left undiagnosed and untreated, where physical isolation from mainstream society leaves her and her siblings uneducated and unprotected from extremist rhetoric and paranoid fantasy.

That Westover is able to pull herself out of this environment and win academic honors is only half the story. The other half covers her less successful struggle to separate herself emotionally from a family that tolerated, ignored, and occasionally imposed the physical and mental abuse that defined her childhood and adolescence.

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It's such a bizarre story that I had a hard time putting the book down. I didn't know that there were people who lived like the author's family. I admire Tara for getting an education and out of her abusive home.

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