Reviews by Bill Smith – Page 6 – Books, Brews & Banter

Educated, by Tara Westover

Educated is a multi-dimensional memoir in which Tara Westover traces her voyage from an isolated and troubling childhood to the highest levels of academia. She grew up in a religiously conservative Mormon family in remote surroundings in the Idaho mountains. The family outlook is more than conservative – as Westover describes it, the ethic is survivalist, isolationist, and distrustful of outside influences, even those from mainstream Mormon sources. Telling are her father’s extensive preparations for Y2K and his ultimate disappointment when those preparations were proved unnecessary. The isolation grew, such that the older children attended community schools for a few years, but Tara never attended school, and her home schooling included little beyond the Bible and the Book of Mormon.

The dominant themes of her youth are dangerous work in the family junkyard and controlling and abusive behavior by an older brother. The picture is more nuanced, however, as she was exposed to outside forces in several ways. One set of grandparents lived in town and provided some contact with the larger world. She developed a singing talent and participated in church music and community theater. She occasionally held jobs in town and developed some trusting friendships with other young people. An older brother went to Brigham Young University and ultimately opened an awareness of that avenue to Tara.

These conflicting forces built Westover’s growing awareness of her talents and opportunities. This section of the memoir left some of our group unsatisfied; some readers would have liked more description, for instance, of how she prepared herself for college admission without the benefit (or burden?) of any formal scholastic training. Other themes were just as important as academic preparation, however. Westover covers how leaving for college allowed her to deal with mental instability and abusive relationships, her own sense of integrity, and the values of family relationships compared to academic work. Ultimately that is unfinished work and she is still wrestling with being part of family without being trapped by it. She deals very honestly with the reality that some of her observations and memories differ substantially from those of other members of the family.

Our group had an interesting discussion of memoir writing. Westover writes from the perspective of the age of about thirty. This gives her an advantage of proximity to the events she writes about, but limits the perspective that may come with more distance and maturity. We expect that the bulk of Westover’s professional and personal development still lies ahead of her and might lead to new reflections of her forming experiences. The etymology of “educated” suggests a drawing out. Usually this implies drawing lessons from the past or work of others or drawing the best out of oneself. This tale also evokes Westover drawing herself away from the complexities of her birth family into the world of higher academia as she studies at Cambridge and Harvard. As education should never end, we await what will fuel Westover’s future memoirs.

— Bill Smith

The Road from Coorain, by Jill Ker Conway

The Road from Coorain revealed layer after layer of fascination. The cover notes let you know what to expect: young woman grows up in the Australian outback, goes on to a distinguished academic career, and ultimately serves as President of Smith College.

Jill Ker Conway is a thoroughly engaging writer. She brings to this already exotic outline evocative description of time and place and penetrating analysis of herself and others. She puts us on the sheep station where she grew up and makes us feel the landscape, the characters that inhabit it, and the highs and lows of life at the margins of the social and economic world of Australia in the 1930s and 1940s. She memorably describes the Australian national myth as exalting “epic failure,” typified by her family’s struggle against natural forces that would inevitably prevail.

Against that often bleak landscape, Conway shows the evolution of her family’s complex relationships and her own growth in awareness and competence. When extended drought pushes her family to move into the city, she has already formed a solid base of independence and curiosity. Building on that, Conway vividly describes her experiences through high school and university that impelled her into a distinguished academic career as a historian. Ultimately the limited academic opportunities and sexual discrimination she encountered in Australia led her to leave for graduate school at Harvard.

The Road from Coorain is the first of three autobiographical works. It is followed chronologically by True North, covering a decade of academic work in Toronto, and A Woman’s Education, dealing with her time as the first female President of Smith College and a reinvention of women’s education.

— Bill Smith

[*]Full disclosure: My mother, sister, and daughter attended Smith.

A Gentleman in Moscow By Amor Towles

By the end of this novel, I admired the amount of information packed into this title.

First, it places us in Moscow, a place somewhat mysterious to most of us, and immerses us in layers of Russian history from the end of the Czarist days, through the revolution, through the tenures of Lenin and Stalin, and into the infighting over the next period of leadership. Towles recreates the period effectively through details of furniture, books, menus, and meetings.

Second, the title draws our focus onto the gentleman, Count Alexander Rostov. We grow to admire how he uses the more admirable traits of the old aristocracy to adapt to his lengthy house arrest in the fading glamor of the Hotel Metropol, which is richly developed as a setting. We come to know its layout, décor, and personalities. Rostov maintains possessions and habits when they conform to his higher goals; he avoids letting ideology prevent him from cultivating friendships among many levels of the hotel’s staff and guests. His “gentleman’s” traits allow him to act as a mentor to two remarkable young girls. Without his established character, some of these relationships might seem improbable. But though these relationships, he seems remarkably to be engaged in society though physically limited to the hotel.

Of course there is action in the novel, but its languid pacing echoes the decades of Rostov’s arrest and suits his expansive and reflective nature. He is allowed to express a philosophical digression from time to time. We always suspect the house arrest must come to an end, but that ending is brilliantly tight and pulls together a number of crumbs that have been left along the reader’s path – some carefully constructed by Rostov and others provided by opportunity but cleverly exploited. We are amazed how he contrives Sofia’s escape from Soviet Russia and his own escape from the Metropol, and we are left to speculate on his future. A surprising number of details are left for us to surmise, but I’d like to think that we are urged to emulate the gentleman and not ask too many unimportant questions and instead focus on the important ones.

—Bill Smith