2024

I had the pleasure of hearing Wes Moore speak at my son's high school in November 2019. At that point, I had not read the book but my son had (required reading) so I was intrigued to hear the story.

This is the story of two young black men, both named Wes Moore. They both grew up in Baltimore. One went on to be a Rhodes Scholar, decorated combat veteran, White House Fellow, and business leader. The other is serving a life sentence in prison. Wes, the scholar, was in South Africa as an exchange student before graduating from Johns Hopkins when he gets a chance to talk to his mom who says to him "the police are looking for another Wes Moore from Baltimore for the murder of a police officer." This intrigues Wes and he decides to interview the other Wes in prison to try to find out how they could start in the same place and end up so differently. They remain in contact and the other Wes did provide approval for the book to be written. ( )

Two men named Wes Moore grew up in almost the same place at almost the same time under very similar circumstances: poor, Black, raised without a father in a neighborhood ravaged by violence and drugs. Wes Moore, the author, managed to have a highly successful life and is now, more than a decade after this book was published, serving as the governor of Maryland. The other Wes Moore was sentenced to life in prison for his part in a jewelry store robbery in which a policeman was fatally shot. Wes Moore, the author, found himself unable to stop thinking about the coincidence and the extent to which it seems like each of them could have so easily had the other's life. And in this book, he tells both of their stories.

It's an interesting and depressing look at what life is like for young men growing up in such circumstances, and, for those privileged enough not to have any idea what it's actually like to experience this kind of life, a useful one. But I can't escape the feeling that there's something a bit unsatisfying about this as a book. Maybe it's just that the author doesn't have any answer to the question of what it is that made the difference in the two men's lives, other than pure, random luck. Which I think is a good answer, and almost certainly the right answer, and I applaud him for resisting the temptation to invent any easier, neater, more self-serving ones. But having come to accept that lack of other answers, what do you do with that? What insights do you take away from it? There aren't a whole lot of those here, either, and while I'll take a shrug and an "I don't know" over a simplistic made-up answer any day, I am still left with a sense of something slightly incomplete. ( )

On the day I finished this book, Wes Moore announced his candidacy for governor of Maryland. I am a bit suspicious of these types of memoirs (I include Obama's Dreams From My Father, a classic in the genre) as having an element of political calculation. Moore acknowledges some of the flaws in this narrative, in that he doesn't take a stand on any of the underlying structural issues that led the other Wes down the road of violence and incarceration. Although he is certainly implying that poverty and absence of positive government intervention in the poorest neighborhoods are the causes of these different outcomes, his thesis is more a vague statement about the value of education. It seems that he is studiously trying to avoid being pinned to any policy positions that could come back to haunt him on the campaign trail. ( )

3.5 stars. The other, Wes Moore, explores the life of another man with the same name in comparison with his own. The two men began life under somewhat similar circumstances, and eventually their paths diverged significantly. This book doesn't really offer explicit solutions to any of the social issues that let to this divergence, but it was an interesting read that shed some light on the inner-city experience of the 80s and 90s. ( )