This week’s selected media, August 18, 2024: Educated, 1619 Project responses

This week I finished:

Educated, by Tara Westover: I didn’t know about this book except seeing the cover in bookstores and the library. I looked it up and saw how many people and institutions put it on their “best of” lists.

I found it riveting. I almost couldn’t believe someone lived through it. I read it toward the end of my first year since my father died. That year brought me introspection, reflection, listening to others talk about their fathers, and sharing my relationship with my father, which regular readers may have picked up from my description of Sebastian Junger’s In My Time of Dying.

Tara Westover’s experience blows away the experience of anyone I’ve spoken to or nearly I can think of. Her resilience is incredible. It put many things for me in wider perspective, which is comforting.

I couldn’t understand why she doubted her sanity and kept returning so much given her understanding of her family’s … what’s the word? … craziness.

Anyway, I recommend it for the quality of the writing, her resilience, and one person’s ability to persevere and overcome obstacles that would seem overwhelming. It also opened my eyes to people and behaviors I would have doubted could exist.

After finishing the 1619 Project, I’m reading follow-ups and criticism. It seemed so one-sided, attributing many things solely to race, missing or downplaying the causes of dominance hierarchies I cover in my book. I recommend reviews and views like the ones below. I’m in the middle of more I’ll post when I finish them.