The Other Wes Moore

Starred review from March 8, 2010
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.

March 1, 2010
A story about two young African-American men who share the same name and grew up on the same inner-city streets, but wound up in vastly different places.

Author Wes Moore, a Rhodes Scholar, former Army officer and White House Fellow, works in investment banking. The other Wes Moore, a drug dealer, is imprisoned for life. Both are in their early 30s. Upon reading about the other Wes's 2000 conviction for armed robbery, the author wondered how the lives of two youths growing up in the same time (1990s) and place (Baltimore) could take such divergent paths. Drawing on conversations with the other Wes and interviews, the author creates an absorbing narrative that makes clear the critical roles that choices, family support and luck play in young people's lives. The other Wes never knew his father, had a drug-pusher older brother and began dealing at an early age. His mother's efforts to help were ineffectual. Often arrested—car theft, attempted murder, etc.—the other Wes dropped out of school, fathered four children and tried unsuccessfully to go straight. Then he took part in the store hold-up. The author faced similar challenges, he writes, but had enormous family support and several lucky breaks. He grew up with a devoted mother and two sisters; his father died when the author was very young. In 1984, the family moved to the crack-plagued Bronx to live with his caring grandparents, a minister and a teacher. When the author slipped into the local street life and began receiving poor grades at a private school, his family pooled limited resources and sent him away to a military academy. There he found positive role models, became a cadet commander and star athlete and gained a sense of purpose. Later, with help from several mentors, he earned a bachelor's degree at Johns Hopkins and attended Oxford."With no intervention—or the wrong intervention—[young boys] can be lost forever," the author warns.

A testament to the importance of youth mentoring; includes an afterword by Tavis Smiley and a guide to more than 200 youth-service groups nationwide.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

April 15, 2010
In this memoir, Moore tells the story of his life as a child of Baltimore and the Bronx, an army officer in Afghanistan, a Rhodes Scholar, and a former White House Fellow. In detailing his journey from troubled adolescence to successful business career, he focuses on the intriguing concept of chronicling not only his life but that of another young man with the same name, from the same city, and roughly about the same age-the other Wes Moore. Drugs, violence, and prison marked the life of the other Wes Moore, now serving a life sentence for the murder of a police officer. The author, after meeting the man who shares his name, gives us a book that details the parallel lives of these two boys, coming of age the hard way in the 1980s and 1990s. The author includes a list of over 200 organizations dedicated to helping American youth. VERDICT With its unique spin on the memoir genre, this engaging and insightful book ultimately asks the reader to consider the ways in which we as a nation alternately support and fail American children. The charismatic author and the publisher's nationwide publicity plans should make this a popular book for general readers interested in memoir, African American studies, or social issues. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 1/10.]Julie Biando Edwards, Univ. of Montana, Missoula, Lib.

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 1, 2010
In 2000, Wes Moore had recently been named a Rhodes Scholar in his final year of college at Johns Hopkins University when he read a newspaper article about another Wes Moore who was on his way to prison. It turned out that the two of them had much in common, both young black men raised in inner-city neighborhoods by single mothers. Stunned by the similarities in their names and backgrounds and the differences in their ultimate fates, the author eventually contacted the other Wes Moore and began a long relationship. Moore visited his namesake in prison; he was serving a life sentence, convicted for his role in an armed robbery that resulted in the killing of an off-duty policeman. Growing up, both men were subject to the pitfalls of urban youth: racism, rebellion, violence, drug use, and dealing. The author examines eight years in the lives of both Wes Moores to explore the factors and choices that led one to a Rhodes scholarship, military service, and a White House fellowship, and the other to drug dealing, prison, and eventual conversion to the Muslim faith, with both sharing a gritty sense of realism about their pasts. Moore ends this haunting look at two lives with a call to action and a detailed resource guide.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)