Last month the City Club of Boise held its inaugural Marilyn Shuler Forum on Human Rights. The speaker for the event was Dr. Les Purce. Dr. Purce is a third generation Idahoan. His family arrived in Idaho in the early 1900s and he was the first black public official elected in Idaho, serving as a Pocatello city council member and then mayor of Pocatello. In 1989 Dr. Purce became the vice-president at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. By 2000, Dr. Purce was the president at Evergreen, a position he held for the next 15 years. Under his governance, Evergreen State College continued its innovative approaches to interdisciplinary study in the arts and sciences, as well as its commitment to equity, inclusiveness, and social justice.
At the end of the Q and A session of the program, one of the audience members asked Dr. Purce what books we should read to 'help bend the arch of freedom toward justice'. The three books he listed were: Political Tribes by Amy Chua, Grant by Ron Chernow, and Educated by Tara Westover.
I texted my friend, Allison, the book list. She had gone to Evergreen while Dr. Purce was president. She texted back that she had just read Educated and thought it was so wonderful that she picked up a copy for me ("My best friend is a person who will give me a book I have not read." - Abraham Lincoln)!
Listen to the City Club event HERE
I loved Educated by Tara Westover. I have heard this book called an unforgettable memoir - that is difficult to read, but impossible to put down. I agree completely.
From a Powell's bookstore interview:
Describe your latest book.
I was raised in the mountains of Idaho by a father who opposed many of the institutions that most people take for granted — public education, doctors and hospitals, the government. As a result I was never put in school, never visited a doctor or nurse, and was not given a birth certificate until age nine. I was 17 the first time I set foot in a classroom, but 10 years later I would graduate from Cambridge with a PhD. Educated is the story of how I came by my education. It is also the story of how I lost my family.
My favorite quotes from the book:
On the highway below, the school bus rolls past without stopping. I am only 7, but I understand that it is this fact more than any other that makes my family different. We don't go to school. Dad worries that the government will force us to go, but it can't because it doesn't know about us. Four of my parents' seven children don't have birth certificates. We have no medical records because we were born at home and have never seen a doctor or nurse. We have no school records because we've never set foot in a classroom.
My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs.
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.
It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you, I had written in my journal. But Shawn had more power over me than I could possibly have imagined. He had defined me to myself, and there’s no greater power than that.
There was a date beneath the image: 1955. I realized that Mother had been four years old in 1955, and with that realization, the distance between me and Emmett Till collapsed. My proximity to this murdered boy could be measured in the lives of people I knew. The calculation was not made with reference to vast historical or geological shifts—the fall of civilizations, the erosion of mountains. It was measured in the wrinkling of human flesh. In the lines on my mother's face.
I began to read—Hume, Rousseau, Smith, Godwin, Wollstonecraft and Mill. I lost myself in the world they had lived in, the problems they had tried to solve. I became obsessed with their ideas about the family—with how a person ought to weigh their special obligations to kin against their obligations to society as a whole
And, from the final page of the book:
You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal.
I call it education.
I loved so much about this book and the author.
If you are left wanting more once you finish reading Educated, check out the following:
C-SPAN interview, Tara Westover tells about her life growing up with survivalist parents in Idaho.
CBS This Morning interview with Tara Westover.
NPR Fresh Air with Dave Davies filling in for Terry Gross.
And here's a quote from The Guardian interview that I didn't want to forget:
You write with the flair of a novelist. How did you learn that?
Everything I wrote at the beginning was awful. Then I became obsessed with the New Yorker fiction podcast.You can hear these wonderful things like Margaret Atwood reading a Mavis Gallant story and then she and Deborah Treisman, the New Yorker fiction editor, will discuss why it works. They’ll bring up all these weird little things that writers do that make it much easier to say – “Yeah, I can do that too”.
