BOOK REVIEW, The Other Wes Moore

(432 words) Apr. 2011

Moore, Wes.
The Other Wes Moore.
2010.
Spiegel & Grau (Random House trademark).
233 pp.
ISBN 978-1-58836-969-7.
$25 hardcover.

Published Livingston County News 4/28/2011.
Also published Midwest Book Review, June 2011, Reviewer's Bookwatch, Joanne's Bookshelf.

Two Wes Moores, one a Rhodes Scholar and the other a felon. The lives of two young boys with the same name, similar backgrounds, families, schools, from Baltimore and the Bronx are chronicled by Wes Moore, a veteran and NYC financier, in his book The Other Wes Moore. The other Wes Moore became imprisoned for life for murder. ‘Two roads diverged…,’ and the author’s psyche compelled him to find out what led them on such opposite roads.

When newspapers were reporting his Rhodes scholarship, they were also reporting the other Wes Moore’s involvement in a jewelry heist and a policeman’s death. The divergence so obsessed Wes that he wrote to the prisoner. The reply arrived about a month later that he could visit Jessup Correctional and talk with the other Wes.

Poor neighborhoods where these two African-American boys lived don’t speak well of America’s war on poverty. Drugs, murders, and all kinds of inequities generate despair in the “projects.” Both boys grew up without fathers; the author’s died of a rare virus, and the other Wes’s father was just absent, drowning his despair in liquor. The author’s mother completed college, but the other Wes’s mother, accepted by Johns Hopkins University, was denied college aid, despite her Associate Degree from Community College of Baltimore. It’s difficult to determine why their two roads led to different outcomes, but poverty surely influenced the other Wes’s early decision to become a lookout for drug dealers that earned him good money. His first high from using was exhilarating and made “him forget everything else.” [62]

The Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne, PA, became a turning point for the author, where his mother enrolled him because of bad grades and skipping classes. . He tried to escape, but got lost and returned chagrined. His Sergeant Austin and Cadet Captain Ty Hill taught him that people really cared about him . [115]

It cannot be said the other Wes didn’t try; he returned to high school after a juvenile detention, was reading at a college sophomore level, later tried Job Corps, and became a carpenter, but he couldn’t earn enough to support his families. The author says, “The chilling truth is that…(the other Wes’s) story could have been mine. The tragedy is that my story could have been his.” [xi and 179]

A “Call to Action” by Tavis Smiley and a forty-six page “Readers Guide” of nonprofits helping youngsters overcome adversity are included. Although moving from one Wes to the other is sometimes difficult to follow, it is a book that is difficult to put down.
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