BOOK REVIEW
Westover paints a picture of her mother as nervous and unsure of
herself, yet one who gains both remarkable confidence and her
own fanaticism over time. She builds her reputation throughout
the region as a midwife and producer of homemade herbal reme-
dies. While Westover’s father chooses this career for his wife, de-
scribing it as God’s calling, the choice seems clearly a component
of his plan for family self-sufficiency. The combination of demands
for herbal and divine healing coupled with her successes caring for
her critically injured family leads her to develop a curious ability
to “finger test” injuries by tapping over injured areas and deter-
mining a severity level and predicted outcome. Westover’s mother
tends, at times around the clock, to the severe injuries the family
sustains in the scrapyard, augmenting her reputation as a proven
healer in the herbal medicine community. However, the mental
wounds of the family’s trauma prove more elusive. She shows a
near complete inability to stand up to her husband’s demands and
the physical and mental abuse from Westover’s brother.
While Westover is clearly influenced by her parents, she is also
influenced by her siblings. This influence prevails as a key theme
throughout the book. She finds escape via her siblings in numer-
ous ways, and eventually, a literal escape from the vortex of Buck’s
Peak. Westover describes hearing music for the first time, outside
of church, while listening to her eldest brother’s collection of con-
traband tapes. She is mesmerized and spends hours lying on the
floor of her brother’s room listening, using music to escape her
narrow world. He later leaves to pursue an education, culminating
in a PhD, against the family’s wishes, but wills his tape collection
to Westover.
Physically, Westover often leaves the mountain alone with an
older brother, Shawn. He is more closely aligned with her father and
displays clear emotional turmoil. He often and repeatedly physi-
cally abuses Westover and manipulates her reaction to the abuse.
Shawn and Westover develop a close but manipulative relation-
ship. Shawn often and repeatedly berates Westover for seemingly
innocuous events, calls her a whore, and shames her for immodest
behavior. One of the more gruesome and surreal moments in this
relationship is the recollection of a disagreement with Shawn in a
store parking lot where he drags Westover out of their truck and
painfully twists her wrist to near fracturing until she admits her
transgressions. She repents, not to God, but to her brother. While
the event was very public, Westover covers for him and painfully
laughs off her abuse in front of others. The physical dominance
and shaming is pervasive in their relationship throughout the
book, but Westover illogically cannot break the grasp of this rela-
tionship, despite the abuse. Westover’s relationship with Shawn is
one of several dysfunctional family relationships Westover comes
back to over and over in the book despite her growing education
and worldly knowledge beyond Buck’s Peak.
her academic rise after studying independently for the ACT and
earning enrollment at Brigham Young University (BYU). Westo-
ver’s academic prowess does not go unnoticed by her professors
and she is recommended, and awarded, a Gates Cambridge schol-
arship. Westover perseveres and pursues her education to great
lengths, as visiting fellow at Harvard and eventual PhD recipient at
Cambridge. As she achieves educational goals, she gradually loses
her family, who do not accept the worldly choices she makes. Each
visit home to Idaho lays bare the chasm between Westover and her
family as she grows more and more in her knowledge and quest
for understanding. Westover, however, never loses herself. In a
profound moment, on the first day of her Cambridge scholarship,
Westover’s mentor and professor watches her walk, with ease and
confidence, among the stone parapets and buttresses of the Cam-
bridge chapel roof while on an unusually windy tour. Westover,
having worked many summers building barns for her father, was
at ease while the rest of the group swayed and grasped for support.
Her professor points out her ease and she deftly notes, “I am just
standing. You are all trying to compensate… the sidestepping is
not natural. You’ve made yourselves vulnerable.” Westover’s un-
conventional upbringing could not be hidden, even as Westover
worked desperately to hide her history and develop the mind of
a scholar.
Though powerful throughout, one of the most powerful state-
ments in the book comes not at the end, or even in the body of
the text, but in the opening Author’s Note. Westover rejects any
notion that her story is one “about Mormonism.” She notes her
story is not about any form of religious belief but that her story
is a compilation of many types of people, kind and unkind. She
notes, “The author disputes any correlation, positive or negative,
between the two.” Despite the eventual rejection by her family for
her quest of what most would think noble, an education, Westo-
ver maintains a powerfully clear point of view in her story. She
accepts that what is done to her through her childhood and life,
even the horrific, is borne of human behavior. She does not levy
the blame on her God, understanding people, including herself,
are responsible for what has happened in her life. Religion, quite
different even from one’s deity, is a human construct, a system
composed of human behaviors, attitudes, prejudices and beliefs.
Westover’s story is not about that system but is about the complex
human characters within that system and the dramatic effect on
her singular life. Consistently evocative throughout, “Educated” is
a compelling read that earns the acclaim bestowed and is worthy
of one’s reading list, regardless of point of view.
Dr. Kolter is a practicing internist with Baptist Health.
Westover clearly is a gifted individual, and this is evident in
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