Biography and memoir reviews: authoritative accounts of real lives, from historical figures to contemporary voices.
There is a moment in Educated, Tara Westover’s extraordinary memoir of growing up in a survivalist family in rural Idaho and eventually earning a PhD from Cambridge, when the author realizes she has been given two entirely different accounts of her own childhood, one from her family and one from documents and records. She cannot…
Tara Westover was born on September 27, 1986, in Clifton, Idaho, the youngest of seven children in a survivalist family that operated largely outside mainstream American society. Her father, a fervent believer in government conspiracies and the imminent end of the world, kept his children away from public schools and hospitals. Westover grew up working…