The Other Wes Moore
Author:
Wes Moore
Publisher:
Spiegel & Grau
Publication Date:
11 January, 2011
ISBN:
9780385528207
Pages:
272
Subjects:
Biographies, History, Social science, Self help
Description:
The chilling truth is that his story could have been mine. The tragedy is that my story could have been his.
Two kids named Wes Moore were born blocks apart within a year of each other. Both grew up fatherless in similar Baltimore neighborhoods and had difficult childhoods; both hung out on street corners with their crews; both ran into trouble with the police. How, then, did one grow up to be a Rhodes Scholar, decorated veteran, White House Fellow, and business leader, while the other ended up a convicted murderer serving a life sentence? Wes Moore, the author of this fascinating book, sets out to answer this profound question. In alternating narratives that take readers from heart-wrenching losses to moments of surprising redemption, The Other Wes Moore tells the story of a generation of boys trying to find their way in a hostile world.
Two kids named Wes Moore were born blocks apart within a year of each other. Both grew up fatherless in similar Baltimore neighborhoods and had difficult childhoods; both hung out on street corners with their crews; both ran into trouble with the police. How, then, did one grow up to be a Rhodes Scholar, decorated veteran, White House Fellow, and business leader, while the other ended up a convicted murderer serving a life sentence? Wes Moore, the author of this fascinating book, sets out to answer this profound question. In alternating narratives that take readers from heart-wrenching losses to moments of surprising redemption, The Other Wes Moore tells the story of a generation of boys trying to find their way in a hostile world.
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PW Publishers Weekly
Review Source:
Publishers Weekly
Review Date:
2010-03-08
Copyright:
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Two hauntingly similar boys take starkly different paths in this searing tale of the ghetto. Moore, an investment banker, Rhodes scholar, and former aide to Condoleezza Rice, was intrigued when he learned that another Wes Moore, his age and from the same area of Greater Baltimore, was wanted for killing a cop. Meeting his double and delving into his life reveals deeper likenesses: raised in fatherless families and poor black neighborhoods, both felt the lure of the money and status to be gained from dealing drugs. That the author resisted the criminal underworld while the other Wes drifted into it is chalked up less to character than to the influence of relatives, mentors, and expectations that pushed against his own delinquent impulses, to the point of exiling him to military school. Moore writes with subtlety and insight about the plight of ghetto youth, viewing it from inside and out; he probes beneath the pathologies to reveal the pressures-poverty, a lack of prospects, the need to respond to violence with greater violence-that propelled the other Wes to his doom. The result is a moving exploration of roads not taken. (May 4) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
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Copyright © 2010 R.R. Bowker LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright © 2010 R.R. Bowker LLC. All Rights Reserved.