Book: Educated

Another of Bill Gates' 5 best books of 2018, this is a memoir by Tara Westover of a girl growing up in northern Idaho in a survivalist household -- no electricity, no plumbing, no doctors, no medicine, no schooling, no birth certificate.

When the kids are injured -- which is inevitable, working in their dad's junkyard -- everybody prays and applies homeopathic medicine which has been activated by passing it through a circle made with their thumb and forefinger.

The father tells the children never to mention being injured because the state will take them away.  

Darn tootin'.

Tara Westover wrote:

Grandma refused to quit chemotherapy, but she did ask Mother about herbal treatments. Mother had brought some with her, hoping Grandma would ask, and Grandma tried them--foot soaks in red clay, cups of bitter parsley tea, tinctures of horsetail and hydrangea.

'Those herbs won't do a damned thing," Dad said. "Herbals operate by faith. You can't put your faith in a doctor, then ask the Lord to heal you."

Odd. These people seem to acknowledge that "faith healing" is all about placebos, without actually admitting that "the herbs do nothing." It takes a special kind of mind to be able to hold such contradictory views simultaneously.

"Educated" reminds me of "Angela's Ashes."  Frank McCourt tells of a childhood so full of misery and unbelievable hardship that, well... finally you begin to disbelieve him.  Is he making this shit up to get sympathy?  Nobody's life is really that wretched, is it?

Westover's upbringing sounds like a scene from "Oliver."

You can picture children growing up under wretched conditions and subjected to the worst sorts of privations.

They generally don't grow up to write books however.