Educated (2018) by Tara Westover is the book that influenced me to go to graduate school and the first book that moved me to tears. The second one is Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country (2023) by acclaimed journalist and Kate Webb Prize For Exceptional Journalism awardee Patricia Evangelista. The book’s description features Westover’s testimonial about Evangelista’s memoir: “Tragic, elegant, vital. Evangelista risked her life to tell this story.” Westover’s story can mirror the tragedy of Evangelista’s accounts of extrajudicial killings in the Philippines, albeit written with finesse and humanity. It is then vital to tell her stories in a post-truth culture where “slaughter dressed up in bureaucratese dulls the senses, and over time can anesthetize an entire population to the horror happening right where they live.”
Migo Aguado 