Educated?

Educated by Tara Westover

There has been real trouble on Walton’s Mountain, oops, sorry, Buck’s Peak. Or maybe Sam Walton's Mountain. Their valley was never green, and this little house styled on the principles of prairie living is really a house of horrors.  Christy by Catherine Marshall is another book that might be at home with this one.

We must remember that memoir is not biography or autobiography; memoir can be a collage of selective memories whose subject is but a slice of the author's life.  As the author points out, different members of the family have different memories of the same event.  Yet, I have a lot of problems believing this is an isolated, survivalist family.  For one thing, though they are allegedly isolated, and living off the grid, they have a computer and are hooked up to The Internet. I wasn’t hooked up to The Internet at home till after I got my own PhD in graduate school. We had quite a presence in my neighborhood, by the way, and we traveled, went to church, ate out, and were well known at T.J. MAXX and Marshall’s.

For another, Ma Westover couldn’t have grown her home remedies into Butterfly Essential Oils, Inc., without contact with the Feds, the FDA, basic concepts of local, state and federal business law, lawyers, contracts, etc.  They family even has its own lawyers and has been involved in at least one law suit dealing with an easement on their property. You can’t just concoct happy juices and lotions and peddle them on the street without running amok of the FDA and other agencies.  Just ask the folks growing marijuana in states where it is legal; they have to pay taxes, get organized, and get regulated.

By the way, Ma Westover had lots of close calls while practicing midwifery; let me note Idaho has a very extensive law on its books regarding midwives.  Here is its citation; 

TITLE 54

PROFESSIONS, VOCATIONS, AND BUSINESSES

CHAPTER 55

MIDWIFERY

     54-5505.

 It’s online.  Look it up.  She couldn’t have flown under the radar that easily on this one, either.  The mountain, after all, was Buck’s Peak, not Olympus, and it was the 1980s, and she wasn’t the goddess Hera.  Mrs. Westover also took classes to improve her skills as an herbalist,; again, this is not something someone living in isolation preparing for End of Days is likely to do.  Or, maybe I just don’t understand my friendly, neighborhood survivalists.

The Westovers drives, albeit not well, take trips; visit their daughter in grad school.  Apparently, they did home school.  I have trouble believing their daughter got into all of these schools with no diploma or GED. Having worked in higher education over thirty years, I can tell you my schools admitted no one without at least a GED.  The last person to educate himself the way she claims she did was Abraham Lincoln.

If you don’t believe me, quoted below are admission requirements for home schooled students for Brigham Young University:

As part of the application, homeschooled applicants will be required to submit any high school or university work completed through an institution accredited by a regional accrediting agency.

Any college work completed before your peers graduated from high school will be considered concurrent enrollment work. You will apply as a freshman and an ACT/SAT score will be required.

If you will not graduate from high school or complete secondary school through home schooling as required by your state, you may be required to submit a GED or state recognized high school equivalency exam. If this is a requirement for you, it will be shown on your status page.  (https://enrollment.byu.edu/admissions/homeschooled-applicants)

Whatever.  Maybe there are universities today that make exceptions, but Ma has her own Facebook page, at least one brother is on Twitter, and two other siblings have doctorates in various fields.  Primitive mountain folk eking out a living to sustain themselves in a fit of paranoia and suspicion do not have a presence on social media.  They also don’t encourage their children to sing in musicals like Annie,  and then come watch them. Really they don’t.  Not to be flip, but I don’t remember seeing Broadway Tunes by Operation Move,  The Ruby Ridge Review, or Christmas with the Branch Dravidians.

Just my opinion; don’t swallow me alive.  This author has a gift for beautiful, poetic prose, but this is a lovely novel.  Perhaps it is based on her family, and I’ve no doubt something happened to her, perhaps by an abusive brother, but this story is to Shakespearian, and to American Gothic, to be taken as gospel truth.

Perhaps I state the obvious.  Read the book and come to your own conclusions; visit the author’s Facebook page and view her various and numerous YouTube appearances.  Come to your own conclusions.   The book is written in beautiful, poetic prose, with a couple incongruities.  E.g., the author states at one point she was feeling “poorly” which is colloquial vocabulary out of place with the rest of her discourse.  

This book is autobiographical or biographical fiction, e.g., The Little House Books, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, and A Million Little Pieces.  I am putting my copy on my bookshelf next to The Amityville Horror.  

July Skyward; a Nightwatchman's Journey: The Road not Taken, by Dr. David Levy, Guest Blogger

Photo provided by Dr. David H. Levy

Skyward                     

By

David H. Levy

A Nightwatchman’s Journey: The Road not Taken

On Friday, June 14, my latest book, my autobiography entitled A Nightwatchman’s Journey: The Road not Taken was launched at the Royal Astronomical Society’s General Assembly in Toronto.    It is a book I have been working on for almost a decade, and it is the story of my life.    The book begins in medias res, in the midst of a suicide attempt that happened shortly after I graduated from Acadia.  I have suffered from depression throughout my life, but this book describes my efforts to conquer it.  It tells of how I made many poor decisions in my life, but how two of them were good.  The best decision was marrying Wendee, which I did in 1997 and with whom I have had 22 happy years.   The other one was to begin, on December 17, 1965, a search for comets. 

It took me nineteen years, searching with telescopes for 917 hours 28 minutes, before I finally found my first comet in 1984.  Since then I have found 22 more.  One was an electronic find shared with Tom Glinos in 2010.  Thirteen were photographic film discoveries shared with Gene and Carolyn Shoemaker (including Shoemaker-Levy 9 which collided with Jupiter in 1994) and there were nine visual comet finds.  If the first seventy-one years of my life had been just staring through the eyepiece of a telescope, however, there would not have been much to write about.  What happened on the road less travelled by, like Robert Frost, has made all the difference. 

Comets, I learned, are not just for viewing.  They are for reading and for studying. At first, I did some high school reading about the discovery of Comet Ikeya-Seki, the brightest comet of the twentieth century.  Years later in graduate school at Canada’s Queen’s University, I prepared a master’s thesis based on the 19^th century English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who observed Comet Tempel in 1864 and subsequently wrote a beautiful poem about it.  But the writer who seemed to be most into astronomy, and whose love of the sky I turned into my Ph.D., was none other than the great William Shakespeare, whose collected works contain more than two hundred references to the sky, including the opening lines to I Henry VI, one of his earliest plays:

Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night!

Comets, importing change of times and states,

Brandish your crystal tresses in the sky.

Even now, when I spend an evening or all night under the stars, I am amazed to be able to share my experiences with so many people, in all walks of life, who have come before me.    Taking a road “that was grassy and wanted wear” might have been risky, but it did point me toward many adventures I’ll never forget.

The Death of the Book?

One of my favorite shows, MeTV's  Collector's Call, recently featured a former Playboy centerfold who collected stellar examples of first editions and children's books, including fine examples of Harry Potter and Alice in Wonderland.  It's fitting, in a way, that this amazing woman was a centerfold; after all, Hugh Hefner was the man who gave Ray Bradbury his start, publishing one version of Fahrenheit 451, a prophetic book about loving books, in Playboy.  I think it was in the first edition.

Photo by author, courtesy Vintage Rose Antiques.

We seem to be fascinated with books, even as we no longer buy, read, keep them.   Secrets of the Dead tonight dealt with a magnificent forgery of a book by Galileo.  It stumped experts allover the world.  Someone must care enough for books, rare ones at least, to want to forge them.  It must be a successful trade somewhere. Even as more people recycle their books to buy an e-reader of some kind, more books seem to crop up at yard sales.  Free little libraries are popping up all over our neighborhoods.  The concept is simple; borrow a book, and leave a book in its place.

Truly, I admit to being a bibliophile.  My mother taught me never to throw away a book [and never to split an infinitive; you'll notice I did not ].I've rescued books that were burned and water damaged, made covers, built shelves, and moved libraries.  I moved two libraries from my old school; a 4000 volume law library, and another 1200 or so volumes from the general library.  They were there for the taking; no one wanted them.  Everything was digital, online, whatever.

It pains me to see old law books torn part for scrapbooking projects; I supposed I should be grateful they are used for something.  They are not out of date; you can check on Shepard's and other citation services whether the cases within their pages are up to date or have been overruled on some point. I hate it when books are torn apart for their illustrations, which are later sold individually.  I love collage and scrapbooking, but I wont' cut up my books.  The landmark cases amid the pages of old law books are still good law, cases like Furman v. Georgia, Brown v. Board of Education, and Marbury v. Madison.  This isn't a law review article, or I would show off my knowledge of legal citation and tell you where to find them.

I've talked to surveyors and cartographers who search out old atlases and stats books; much of the knowledge they hold is not on The Net; it can't really be put there.  They serve as a comparison and stepping stone for other research.

Actually, I'm never happier than in a library.   I sent many books overseas, and arranged for others to have good homes, but I admit I kept a lot of them.   I use them.  Serious scholarly research still requires books, not websites.

I'm with Corey Doctorow and others who avidly load their Kindles, read online, thrive on their Google Library, but I have my books, too.  Many are beautiful, works of art in themselves.  Antique children's books, miniatures, 260 year old Bibles  Like The Book Thief's heroine, I suppose I never get enough.

Celebrating the Legacy of Beverly Port with John Paul Port