Tämä sivusto käyttää evästeitä palvelujen toimittamiseen, toiminnan parantamiseen, analytiikkaan ja (jos et ole kirjautunut sisään) mainostamiseen. Käyttämällä LibraryThingiä ilmaiset, että olet lukenut ja ymmärtänyt käyttöehdot ja yksityisyydensuojakäytännöt. Sivujen ja palveluiden käytön tulee olla näiden ehtojen ja käytäntöjen mukaista.
Nickelini: Quite different views of Mormon life, but both books are compelling reads of young women who suffered through horrific lives under the control of domineering and manipulative men.
BookshelfMonstrosity: These wrenching autobiographies examine how parents with fiercely held beliefs can damage their children on multiple fronts. Forbidden from engaging with the rest of society in normal ways, the authors endured shattering psychological abuse before their eventual escape.… (lisätietoja)
bjappleg8: Both books describe in intimate detail the supreme effort required to break free of fundamentalist beliefs and the pain of being cast out of their close-knit families as a result.
Carissa.Green: Sarah Smarsh's memoir is about a similarly-aged girl growing up in a rural area on the economic fringes, but Smarsh's memoir is more analytical and deals much less in the sensationalism of having a violent, mentally ill parent.
This memoir has been recommended to me many times over since it came out, and I was more than impressed. I truly wish there was a way to more elegantly put how well written this book is. There is such great narrative detail in not just the setting and what was happening around Tara, but also a brilliant narrative description of the mental turmoil that she went through coming to terms with her childhood and the trauma she had faced. There was never a moment where I didn't feel connected and intrigued by the story, and I normally have a harder time with nonfiction stories. The accolades that this story has received are truly well deserved and I am glad to have finally read it. ( )
I listened to this book prior to a conference where I would hear the author speak. Working in higher education, I found this book fascinating and purchased the paperback version later read through the book in physical format. ( )
I have a lot to say about this book. An American friend once told me that a lot of fringe religions and just plainly crazy people sought refuge in the US from persecution in their home countries. But maybe it's more about self-identification. I'm also listening to Neil Gaiman's "American Gods" at the moment and he writes:
“This is the only country in the world," said Wednesday, into the stillness, "that worries about what it is." "What?" "The rest of them know what they are. No one ever needs to go searching for the heart of Norway. Or looks for the soul of Mozambique. They know what they are.”
Anyways, this story could have only happened in the US. Mormonism actually was founded in the US. Tara Westover is born in Idaho in a Mormon family, but her father isn't like other Mormons in the town, he is a survivalist. It's often said that we don't choose the families we are born in and Tara had a very bad lack in this department. I expected that the book would be more about her journey to education, but it was much more about her family - her father, mother, sister and five brothers. It was often very disturbing to read. Tara suffered from domestic violence and massive gaslighting. They were putting their lives and the lives of their children in the hands of God to the levels of a complete lack of common sense and basic safety. I was always taught: "Protect yourself, and the God will protect you." But that was clearly not the religion they preached. It's really a God's miracle they are still all alive - at one point it felt like I was reading about The Incredibles family.
"If the first fall was God’s will, whose was the second?"
Tara's road from not attending school at all and obtaining a PhD from the University of Cambridge at age 27 is another miracle, which is also probably only possible in the US. It feels like she doesn't want to brag about it. For a long time she suffers from the imposter syndrome and she is lucky to meet professors who help her. I would have liked to read more about that, as I said. But this book is more about personal self-discovery through education, when after so many years of gaslighting you don't even know where to start. I think her dissertation topic was very personal and maybe that's why it was so good.
For me, one of the strongest ideas in the book was about the power of doubt and not knowing. She grew up with only one truth - that of her father. The power of education is in the absence of a single truth, but that is also why education will never win over ignorance - people need simple truths.
"To admit uncertainty is to admit to weakness, to powerlessness, and to believe in yourself despite both. It is a frailty, but in this frailty there is a strength: the courage to live in your own mind, and not in someone else’s. I have often wondered if the most powerful words I wrote that night came not from anger or rage, but from doubt: I don’t know. I just don’t know."
"Of the nature of women, nothing final can be known. Never had I found such comfort in a void, in the black absence of knowledge. It seemed to say: whatever you are, you are woman." ( )
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The past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, & thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past. - Virginia Woolf
I believe finally, that education must be conceived as a continuing reconstruction of experience; that the process and the goal of education are one and the same thing. - John Dewey
Omistuskirjoitus
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For Tyler
Ensimmäiset sanat
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My strongest memory is not a memory.
Sitaatit
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...I had finally begun to grasp something that should have been immediately apparent: that someone had opposed the great march toward equality; someone had been the person from whom freedom had been wrested. (p. 180)
...something shifted nonetheless. I had started on a path of awareness, had perceived something elemental about my brother, my father, myself. I had discerned the ways in which we had been sculpted by a tradition given to us by others, a tradition of which we were either willfully or accidentally ignorant. I had begun to understand that we had lent our voices to a discourse who sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others--because nurturing that discourse was easier, because retaining power always feels like the way forward. (p. 180)
I had decided to study no history, but historians. I suppose my interest came from the sense of groundlessness I'd felt since learning about the Holocaust and the civil rights movement--since realizing that what a person knows about the past is limited, and will always be limited, to what they are told by others. I knew what it was to have a misconception corrected--a misconception of such magnitude that shifting it shifted the world. Now I needed to understand how the great gatekeepers of history had come to terms with their own ignorance and partiality. I thought that if I could accept that what they had written was not absolute but was the result of a biased process of conversation and revision, maybe I could reconcile myself with the fact that the history of most people agreed upon was not the history I had been taught. Dad could be wrong, and the great historians Carlyle and Macauley and Trevelyan could be wrong, but from the ashes of their dispute I could construct a world to live in. In knowing the ground was not ground at all, I hoped I could stand on it. (p. 238)
It's strange how you give the people you love so much power over you, I had written in my journal. ... He had defined me to myself, and there's no greater power than that. (p. 199)
I had been taught to read the words of men like Madison as a cast into which I ought to pour the plaster of my own mind, to be reshaped according to the contours of their faultless model. I read them to learn what to think, not how to think for myself. (p. 239)
I had begun to understand that we had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanized and brutalized others--because nurturing that discourse was easier, because retaining power always feels like the way forward. (p. 180)
My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs. (P. 197)
This moment would define my memory of that night, and of the many nights like it, for a decade. In it I saw myself as unbreakable, as tender as stone. At first I merely believed this, until one day it became the truth. Then I was able to tell myself, without lying, that it didn’t affect me, that he didn’t affect me, because nothing affected me. I didn’t understand how morbidly right I was. How I had hollowed myself out. For all my obsessing over the consequences of that night, I had misunderstood the vital truth: that its not affecting me, that was its effect. (p. 111)
I believed then—and part of me will always believe—that my father’s words ought to be my own. (p. 172)
What was important to me wasn’t love or friendship, but my ability to lie convincingly to myself: to believe I was strong. I could never forgive Charles for knowing I wasn’t. (p. 189)
I wonder now if the day I set out to steal that tax return wasn’t the first time I left home to go to Buck’s Peak. That night I had entered my father’s house as an intruder. It was a shift in mental language, a surrendering of where I was from. My own words confirmed it. When other students asked where I was from, I said, “I’m from Idaho,” a phrase that, as many times as I’ve had to repeat it over the years, has never felt comfortable in my mouth. When you are part of a place, growing that moment in its soil, there’s never a need to say you’re from there. I never uttered the words “I’m from Idaho” until I’d left it. (p. 206)
I had to think before I could answer. “I can stand in this wind, because I’m not trying to stand in it,” I said. “The wind is just wind. You could withstand these gusts on the ground, so you can withstand them in the air. There is no difference. Except the difference you make in your head.” He stared at me blankly. He hadn’t understood. “I’m just standing,” I said. “You are all trying to compensate, to get your bodies lower because the height scares you. But the crouching and the sidestepping are not natural. You’ve made yourselves vulnerable. If you could just control your panic, this wind would be nothing.” “The way it is nothing to you,” he said. — I WANTED THE MIND of a scholar, but it seemed that Dr. Kerry saw in me the mind of a roofer. The other students belonged in a library; I belonged in a crane. (p. 237)
...vindication has no power over guilt. No amount of anger or rage directed at others can subdue it, because guilt is never about them. Guilt is the fear of one’s own wretchedness. It has nothing to do with other people. (p. 327)
I am not the child my father raised, but he is the father who raised her. (p. 328)
Viimeiset sanat
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Google Books — Ladataan...
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