| | |  | Security Jobs | Home » » The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates | | | | | | | Description: | | 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.
"The chilling truth is that his story could have been mine. The tragedy is that my story could have been his."
| | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| Wes Moore | | Paperback:
| 272 pages | | Publisher:
| Spiegel & Grau | | Publication Date:
| January 11, 2011 | | Language:
| English | | ISBN:
| 0385528205 | | Product Length:
| 5.19 inches | | Product Width:
| 0.6 inches | | Product Height:
| 8.0 inches | | Product Weight:
| 0.5 pounds | | Package Length:
| 7.9 inches | | Package Width:
| 5.1 inches | | Package Height:
| 0.7 inches | | Package Weight:
| 0.5 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 131 reviews |
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94 of 99 found the following review helpful:
 Two young men at a fork in the roadMar 10, 2010
By N. B. Kennedy
In 2000, a Baltimore newspaper ran a story with the headline, "Local Graduate Named Rhodes Scholar." It was a story about the author, Wes Moore, a young black man who rose from the drug, crime and poverty-stricken streets of the city to attain this prestigious academic honor.
Several months earlier, in the same paper, Mr. Moore had noticed a series of articles about two young black men who killed a Baltimore policeman while robbing a jewelry store. The name of one of the killers struck him: his name was Wes Moore.
This coincidence prompts the author to seek out "the other Wes Moore." He contacts Wes in prison. "How did this happen?" he asks. The question jumpstarts the story of these two young men whose life paths diverged, one into triumph, the other into tragedy.
The author comes to realize that this seemingly complicated story, a too-familiar story that is freighted with societal, economic and racial impact, comes down to a few simple moments in time. "These forks in the road can happen so fast for young boys," he says. "Within months or even weeks, their journeys can take a decisive and possibly irrevocable turn."
I would more specifically pin the divergence on the boys' mothers. The author is born into a two-parent home, both parents college educated, but his father dies when Wes is just three. His mother moves to the Bronx, so that her parents can help provide a stable home life. She works multiple jobs so that she can put her boys in private school. When the author starts to feel the pull of the streets, she packs him off to military school.
The other Wes Moore grows up in a single-parent household of starkly different character. His father is absent and his mother frequently dumps him on friends and family so she can go out clubbing. Although she'd been attending community college, she loses her Pell Grant and simply gives up. Disagreements in the home are handled with beatings. The older brother gets into the drug trade, and all three of them, mother and two sons, bring babies into the world without the stability of marriage. It's no surprise when the other Wes Moore's run-ins with the law begin.
This is a compelling story told with passion and understanding. While the author is compassionate, he also makes clear that he is in no way excusing the other Wes Moore for his heinous deed. Even so, I imagine this is a tough book for the family of the slain policeman to read. If you want another great story of a young black man from Baltimore who succeeds thanks to his determined mother, read Byron Pitts's Step Out on Nothing: How Faith and Family Helped Me Conquer Life's Challenges.
57 of 60 found the following review helpful:
The difference betweren reasons and excusesApr 01, 2010
By L. F. Smith
At first glance, this book looks like an interesting read based on an unusual coincidence. A young Baltimore man named Wes Moore, an Army officer who had just graduated from Johns Hopkins and was named a Rhodes Scholar, learned that another young Baltimore man also named Wes Moore had just been sentenced to life in prison without parole for his role in a robbery that resulted in the murder of an off-duty policeman. The first Wes Moore naturally began to wonder about why he had avoided the fate of the second Wes Moore, even though their surroundings and upbringings had been quite similar. So, in a way, this is a "Wow! It could have been me in prison!" story.
That probably would have made for an interesting book, but Moore chose to examine his life and the second Wes Moore's life in parallel with one another in an effort to determine where-- and, more importantly, why-- their fates diverged. That makes this an important book, because it raises a critical question: What makes so many young men-- and particularly black, poor young men raised mostly by their mothers-- choose the drug trade and all of the violence that attends it as a career?
As it turns out, Moore can't answer that question. As he explains, both he and the other Wes Moore were raised at the same time in the same high-poverty, drug- and crime-plagued area. They both began to struggle in school at about the same time. They both had early brushes with the law due to petty crimes at about the same time. However, their lives took dramatically different paths.
Moore never specifically says it, but nonetheless, as one reads his account of their parallel lives, the difference is in the ways that their mothers lived their own lives and reacted to what their sons were doing. Moore's mother was raised by college-educated parents, and she spent her life working and struggling to achieve things for herself and her family. She moved several times in an effort to find stable, safe places for her kids to grow up, and she worked several jobs so she could afford to put her kids into private schools. When it appeared that Moore was going to fall into the thug lifestyle, she sacrificed economically and emotionally to put him into a military school. In short, she simply refused to allow herself or her kids to succumb to the conditions and temptations that surrounded them. In contrast, the other Wes Moore's mother tried to resist those conditions and temptations, but she eventually did succumb to them. She simply gave up. At the same time, unlike the first Wes Moore's mother, she allowed her kids to see violence as an acceptable way to resolve problems in their lives.
In the end, it comes down to forks in the road of time. At several critical points in his youth, the first Wes Moore went down one path, mostly due to the influence of his mother. Unfortunately for the other Wes Moore, there was no one to influence him to take the "right" path, and he chose the easier, more glamorous path of thug culture and the drug trade.
Moore isn't at all smug or self-righteous about how his life compares to that of the other Wes Moore. Nor does he pity the other Wes Moore. That's because there is a difference between reasons and excuses. That is, there are abundant reasons for the choices that the second Wes Moore made and their tragic consequences for himself, his family, and his victims. However, the first Wes Moore clearly doesn't regard any of those reasons as acceptable excuses. Both Wes Moores came to forks in their lives; one of them made-- or was forced to make-- the right choices, and the other one didn't. But they were choices, and they are ultimately responsible for making them.
This is a unique and compelling book. I recommend it most highly.
27 of 27 found the following review helpful:
 Fascinating story.....with some blanksJun 01, 2010
By Book lover -Philadelphia
This is a very well-written book, with a fascinating story to tell. It's clear that the author has done his research and he demonstrates the reason for "the other" West Moore's life turning out the way it did. What is less excellent is that he does not provide the same level of insight into his own life, particularly in his teen-age and later years. [We get a great deal of detail of his early life and his feelings of displacement, his skipping school, etc.]. Yes, he tells what happened and what he did but he leaves out the guts. For example, he goes from describing the initial days of Valley Forge Military Academy to, suddenly, his position as leader of the 700-strong Cadet Corps. What happened in between? Yes, he names his mentors there but what did HE do? For another example, he attends junior college at VFMA - and, suddenly, he is eligible for Johns Hopkins despite less-than-required grades. OK, it appears that there was some affirmative action here but that would not account for his graduating from Hopkins Phi Beta Kappa (at least, I hope not). What happened to make him such a stellar student?
It's clear by the end of the book that the author is a star - and I'm not giving away anything that is not on the book jacket. Unfortunately, I didn't feel that I really knew him or what made him tick. Nonetheless, I would recommend the book for the extraordinarily detailed and insightful portrait of his and the other Wes' early lives.
58 of 66 found the following review helpful:
 What Made the Difference? Class.Apr 27, 2010
By A. Ross
I'm not one who usually reads "uplifting" true stories with words like "hope" prominently featured in the title or subtitle, but I gave this one a chance for three reasons. First of all, some of it takes place in neighboring Baltimore in the mid-'90s, which is interesting to anyone, like me, who loved the HBO series The Wire. Secondly, at lot of the kids who come into the library I work at are in the same position as the two young Wes Moores described in the book -- they might succumb to the call of the street, or they might not. Finally, it's short and quick -- if I'm going to read a book like this, I don't want it to be padded out to reach 300 page ideal (note that the final 80 pages of the book are a list of organizations across the country that work to improve the lives of disadvantaged youth).
The premise of the book is that two young black men with the same name, coming up in roughly the same area, ended up in very different places in life. One is serving a life sentence for his role in a jewelry store heist in which a guard was killed, and the other ended up Rhodes Scholar and White House Fellow. The book came out of the latter one's desire to trace their histories and try and figure out why his life has worked out, while the other Wes's hasn't. He tells their life stories chronologically, alternating from himself to the incarcerated Wes, laying out the choices they made, and the context for those choices. He does this efficiently and fairly evocatively, managing to convey what goes on inside the heads of boys and young men without being overly analytical or judgemental. However, at the end, I was rather shocked to see him write the following of his grand investigation: "What made the difference?...The truth is that I don't know."
Well, any reader of the book could tell him -- the difference is class. Both his parents were college educated, his mother was more involved in his life and had vastly greater financial resources to devote to him, and he had high-achieving siblings. That's pretty much it. When the eventually-successful Wes made some poor decisions as a kid, his mom was able to ask her parents for the money to put him first in private school, and eventually in an elite military academy. Once he prospered in that environment, doors started opening for him, as the network of connections started helping him up the ladder. The other Wes's mother had no financial or familial support to draw upon, and eventually lost control of her son, who main male role model was his drug-dealing half-brother.
So, ultimately, there's not much of a lesson here, nor any kind of revelatory strategy for helping young black men. But it is a very instructive case study on how class mechanisms work in America, and what they mean in a tangible, concrete sense.
49 of 56 found the following review helpful:
 A disappointing readOct 03, 2010
By RJD
As a forensic psychologist, I was quite intrigued by the premise of the book but ultimately disappointed. It is presented as a study in how two boys with such similar backgrounds could have ended up in such different places - one a Rhode Scholar with a promising career in finance, the other convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. The author, Rhode Scholar Wes Moore, makes the argument that his childhood was very similar to that of the other Wes Moore, convicted felon. But from the very first chapter, the vast differences in their upbringing (even genetics) is apparent. It is never hard to understand how their lives ended up so differently - the Rhode Scholar was born into a loving, intact family with 2 college educated parents. Even after the tragic death of his father, his family remains a strong support in his life, with all sorts of relatives offering both financial and emotional support. Contrast that with the other Wes Moore, who is born to a single mother, the second of her children born out of brief, unstable relationships with alcoholic uninvolved fathers. They are worlds apart from the moment of conception but this is not acknowledged or perhaps understood by the author - at one point he acknowledges that having an adult who is invested in your well-being is key to children's healthy development but then doesn't relate this to how different his life was (with the support of an uncle, grandfather and a very strong and involved mother) from the other Wes Moore (whose mother left him unattended from age 8 and whose primary influence was a criminally involved older brother).
In the end, I was left with the impression that this was a vanity project for the author. The sections about his life get longer and longer while the sections about the other Wes Moore get shorter and shorter. In the epilogue, the author devotes several pages to listing his achievements in life - these are never connected to other events or analyzed in any way - it's simply a list of things he has done. An impressive list certainly, but it offers nothing to the book. The book also seems to be the author's attempt to establish "street cred" - he seems almost desperate to make clear that he grew up poor and disadvantaged (even though he and his siblings went to an expensive private school). It comes off as false and self-serving. For example, his claims that they both had brushes with the law as children overlooks the type and severity of those - the author gets a lecture from a cop at age 11 for spray painting a building while the other Wes Moorewas arrested at age 8 for threatening another child with a knife.
If you want to understand why these two men ended up in such different places, it's not difficult at all. There is a fundamental difference between being raised by a single mother because your father died of illness versus because your father has no interest in you and would not recognize you. There is a fundamental difference between mothers who have children at age 16 in the context of a casual relationship and those who wait until after marriage. There is a fundamental difference between a family who rallies around its children, pushes them to succeed and takes action when one of the children is having problems and a single mother who leaves her child alone or in the care of a drug dealing brother who teaches him to fight.
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