Tara Westover was born in 1986. In this wonderful and moving book she writes about education and what it means as an essential and yet complex question.

Sometimes and not pompously, she talks about her own childhood, adolescence, education and non-education. Her family comes from the remote mountains of Idaho in the United States. She first attended school when she was 17 at the Brigham Young University. After graduating from King’s College in Cambridge, she graduated with a PhD in History in 2014.

But her exemplary educational path also turned out to be a fight. She was a young girl struggling with guilt and loyalty towards her family. Her parents were excessively controlling. The family had many taboos especially about some of her relatives’ violence tendency.

Reading this book is sometimes disturbing and even provokes anger. But it’s hard to let go of it, the last chapter is too much worth reading.