Last week I finished
I'd seen it everywhere, and I'm a memoir junkie, so I just had to pick up a copy of Educated by Tara Westover. You've probably seen this one around, but there is never much information about it. All I knew going in was it was the memoir of a woman who grew up without formal education in a family of survivalists in rural Idaho and who later went on to college. I believe it is the author's wish to keep the fact that her family were fundamentalist Mormons on the down low. I had not seen that mentioned anywhere where the book was discussed, but it's essentially what the book is about. I suppose there is a fear of prejudice against fundamentalist (and mainstream, for that matter) Mormons when you read about this woman's horrific childhood, but I really wish the reader would have been given more credit for being able to suss out what's a traditional Mormon belief and what's been twisted to the point that a family lives by extremes. Because this family was living the violent, paranoid extreme end of a traditional belief. There is so much violence, some person and person, but most just careless accidents, it's almost hard to believe all of that could happen to one family. Not until Westover is in college at Brigham Young University does she realize her father was mentally ill, if not manic depressive or schizophrenic, and that accounted for many of the revelations he turned into law in the Westover home. This is a sad, troubling book. It never lets up. I've read scores of books about young women escaping fundamentalist Mormon families (usually of the polygamous Warren Jeffs variety, though), and this is very similar. Its one main difference is how well-written it is. Though Westover had zero education when she took the ACT and started college, she caught up very quickly. With less than 100 pages left, I wasn't sure I'd finish the book without feeling like I was missing the redemption that would make it all worth the horrifying experience. Luckily, it all came together, though it didn't necessarily end happily. Overall, I think the underlying themes here are: families have a strong pull, whether for goof or bad, and education is not necessarily just about learning about the world and how we live in it, but it's also about how the world lives in us, how education shows us ourselves. I've never read a book that showed that as explicitly. Bottom line, if you can stomach to grim story and the violence and the mental instability, it's a worthwhile read. My rating: 4.5 stars. 
For decades historians have hypothesized that Eleanor Roosevelt had a long-term lesbian affair with a journalist named Lorena Hickok. Hickok spent many of FDR's twelve years in office living in the White House, which was not altogether unusual as the Roosevelts generally kept the spare rooms in the White House full of family and friends. I've never read a book by a historian that definitively confirms the affair--Doris Kearns Goodwin did not in No Ordinary Time, and Ken Burns did not in his documentary series The Roosevelts: An Intimate History. I've always been on their side unwilling to confirm the lesbian infidelity without hard proof, though others are more willing to rule with emotion or probability. The Roosevelt children themselves were not in agreement about which of the "known" affairs their parents were said to have had actually happened. The letters between the two women do seem like love letters--if read a certain way, and scandal certainly sells these days. So, I was kind of disheartened to see Amy Bloom had written a fictional history of the affair from the point of view of Lorena Hickok called White Houses. I avoided the book for months thinking it distasteful to imagine what does on in other women's bedrooms, especially a First Lady's. But then--and I'm kind of ashamed of this--curiosity got the better of me. I'm infinitely interested in how a story or book is put together, and I wanted to know how this unconfirmed romance would be treated, so I picked up a copy. I have to say that I was quite impressed with the book as a whole. The writing was engaging, and the voice and persona of Hick (Lorena Hickok) felt "right." Many reviews I've read complained about the lack of plot, but that is never something that bothers me. And here, I don't think plot was Bloom's point. I think her main concern was showing the relationship of a long in love "mature" couple. And it excelled at that. I did feel that the interplay, and specifically the dialogue, between Hick and Eleanor was odd, stilted, coded. It was oddly unnatural. In all, I was pleased with the book, though I do think Bloom is a little too sure about who was carrying on with whom, especially when it came to Missy LeHand and FDR. LeHand's biographer, Kathryn Smith, determined that there was no evidence of an affair, no matter the outward appearance of their relationship. (See my review of Smith 's book here.) My rating: 4 stars.
I needed to find an audiobook to swap in for one that was not going to be in when I needed it. On the new audiobook shelf, I found Code Girls and snapped it up. I love reading about World War II and adore books that are about any one tiny aspect of American history. I also love learning about things I know very little about. So, win, win, win, win. Code Girls is the story of the female code breakers during World War II. These women were mostly recruited from the best colleges to learn how to decipher coded enemy communications. The information gathered from these messages was essential to naval and ground commanders in planning their strategic operations. Because a majority of the able-bodied men were involved in the fighting in the European or Pacific theatres, women were given the chance to pick up the slack. And they did it marvelously. There was a time when I'd have read anything about women throughout American history. As my world view has changed over the years, however, I have cooled in my love of rah-rah women's history books. This book is a good example of why. I find it intellectually dishonest, or at the very least, ignorant, to make determinations of racism or sexism using today's standards against yesteryear's events. All of the instances of "sexism" put forth in this book drove me crazy. If the accusations were viewed in context--the 1940s were nearly 80 years ago!--the things we would view as sexist now were not sexist then. Take pay disparity, for instance. In the 1940s, very few women worked, and men's wages provided for their families. When scores of single women with no dependents went to work for the war effort, they were sometimes paid less than their male counterparts, in part, because they did not have dependents at home to pay for. This is a perfectly reasonable practice--for the time. Today, of course, many families are headed by women, and a disparity of pay for the same work with identical qualifications is unforgivable. But to use today's standard to judge yesterday's events is dishonest, and that's my main beef with this book. There weren't a lot of instances, but there were enough to make me lose trust in the author's ability to set forth an unvarnished truth, so I felt the need to listen to the book against the grain. My perspective was this: women had only had the right to vote for 20 years when they were given the opportunity to step into a man's job and do work that was instrumental in bringing the war to an end and bringing their brothers, boyfriends, and husbands home. Had Mundy stuck to this positive message, I think it would have been a stronger book. Still, a good book, and a good audio version. My rating: 3 stars.
Last week I began
I L-O-V-E love Clementine. Period.
This week I continue with
I'm working my way through Pretty in Plaid, and I'm feeling that it's maybe too long.
I'm loving The Read-Aloud Family and Devotions.
My next audiobook
My hold for Endurance has finally come in, so I'd better listen to it quickly so the next holdee can have it. I've been looking forward to this for a long time.
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