Tara Westover grew up in an isolated part of Idaho, as far off the grid as her Mormon parents could get. She had no birth certificate, wasn’t vaccinated, and never received medical or dental care. Her mother was an unlicensed midwife who practiced homeopathic medicine, her father a survivalist who stockpiled weapons and put his four children to work in his junkyard — instead of sending them to school. Tara was a teenager before she’d heard of the Holocaust or Martin Luther King. But she was taught to read, and the world she glimpsed in books helped her survive her family’s irrational rules and paranoia, her brother’s abusiveness, and the severe injuries she suffered in the family’s scrapyard. Determined to find another way to live, Westover eventually attended Brigham Young University, then Harvard, and finally earned a Ph.D. in history from Cambridge. Her memoir is a harrowing, courageous, and deeply moving account of her journey from unimaginable privation to the life of a respected academic and powerful writer. [Click here to read the Independent's recent review of Educated.]