It is a memoir of Tara Westover about her journey from rural Idaho to Cambridge. The book takes upon some of the issues that affect our present society. We,as humans have our views confined and are not ready to listen to others. Be it in the social media or having a social group echoing our thoughts, we limit to views that we like to hear. A need to check for the fake news published or debunking the conspiracy theories is the need of the hour.
This book feels like a daily journal of a girl sharing her life experiences and transporting us into that world. It tells about her world view as a child and how it constantly changes as she grew up. We see it many of her understandings of the society and issues she understands like the black slavery, holocaust, white supremacy. Her encounters with her brother shaun especially brings chills down our spine and we face disappointment when her family normalizes it.
She finally coming to terms with the bipolar disorder of her father,brother,breaking free of the prison she built for herself and this makes for some great plot points. We,as society have constantly been told the perils of education but when an actual person tells how it changes her life decisions,we marvel at what education can do to a person and that makes this a remarkable book to read.
“Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind. This was the price I was being asked to pay, I understood that now. What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me.”
― Tara Westover, Educated
Nomad 