Educated

Educated by Tara Westover, 334 pages

                                                            Educated is a surprise of a memoir.

The author weaves a backstory that applies to the book's title, about how she rose from the backwoods of a home schooled mountain education and progressed to be both a visiting fellow at Harvard University and earn a PhD in history from Cambridge University in England.

However the story is so much more than that. Tara is the survivor of severe emotional abuse by her mentally ill father, and physical abuse at the hands of one of her brothers. Her mother ignores Tara's trauma and supports both her husband's and son's behavior. Tara ultimately survives the abuse and is able to progress her education by retreating into herself, and by eventually seeking therapy at the recommendation of her academic mentors who recognize both her talent and her need for help.

I recommend this book for those who want to read a story about survival in the face of extreme adversity.

David and Goliath

David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants / Malcolm Gladwell, read by the author, 305 p.

Could dyslexia be an advantage?  How about childhood trauma? or religious persecution?  David and Goliath is an exploration of the ways in which humans fail to calculate where true power lies, as the Philistines did in the Bible story of the title.  Using the narrative of a preteen girls' basketball team of inexperienced players whose coach, from India, knew nothing about the game, Gladwell explores what really constitutes strength and weakness.  In the case of the basketball team, by analyzing the game and weighing up the skill sets of his players, the coach brought his rag-tag team to the national championships by exploiting the weaknesses of their more skilled opponents through the continuous and energetic use of the full-court press. 

Gladwell goes on tell us about those who succeeded in other arenas not by playing better but by playing harder or differently: a pediatric leukemia specialist whose horrible childhood enabled him to take great risks in pursuit of new treatments, dyslexic men who went on to become successful Hollywood moguls and Wall Street brokers, and a stubborn French Huguenot who fearlessly defied the Nazis.  In each case, Gladwell's unique perspective and narrative gifts keep the listener on the edge of her seat.