Educating: A Memoir

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Usually in reports of scientific and engineering projects we follow what is known as the "80/20 rule," which is that reports focus on key messages and points and deliberately leave out seemingly contradictory or excessively complicated information for general audiences. But in her mother’s memoir although it was still a VERY arduous battle it seemed totally worth it because there was more healing possible than if they had gone to the hospital, especially with the burn injuries.

Luke is depicted as the brother who caught fire in the scrapyard and Westover had to help Faye nurse him back to health. Soon there would be scarcely a literary circle or neighborhood book club that wasn’t buzzing about first-time author Tara Westover. I was not going to spend money on this book, so thankfully the library system was able to locate ONE copy of the book.She worked the family business — a dangerous scrap salvage yard where the children dodged metal and teetered perilously on beams and forklifts.

I hope that this book in some small way will be encouraging to those struggling to pioneer a new way of educating their children. Of the seven children in our family, six of them attended formal higher education classes (Luke is the only one who has not, and as described in Tara’s book, classroom education is not really his thing).Our parents are extremists, and they and other members of our family have done terrible things that have hurt Tara.

Reading her version triggered too many painful memories of my attempts to form relationships with Val and LaRee. She also knows what it’s like to be homeless and to be in jail, to come from a dysfunctional family (some members of her family are also recovering addicts). To expand a little further, our father also said that he did not think that the government would send local law enforcement or even federal agents to take guns away from law-abiding U.A Million Little Pieces ,” an addiction memoir by James Frey, came to an embarrassing confessional end on “Oprah.

The book was also nominated for a number of national awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, PEN America's Jean Stein Book Award, and two awards from the National Book Critics Circle Award. I confess I only read part of LaRee's book because the parts I did read were so disturbing and dishonest, I needed to set it aside to maintain my own sanity.

You can’t mend your relationships with your siblings until you mend your relationships with your parents. It is important to note that many of the stories in Tara's memoir took place before she was born, so they are not her memories at all. This, according to Sutoris, makes them important places to study how young people are schooled in facing the accelerated realities of environmental and social crises.