Tara Westover’s wildly improbable rise from a childhood working in the family scrapyard to earning a PhD in history from Cambridge is the basis of her successful memoir, Educated. Not only did Westover never set foot in a school until she entered Brigham Young University at seventeen, but her father was an anti-government survivalist, stockpiling fuel, home-canned peaches and guns for the “end times” he knew were coming. Sermonizing to his family most evenings about his fundamentalist Mormon beliefs, he considered the idea that any of his children might leave home to go to college as following Satan. He railed that college campuses were rife with immorality and socialism.
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