Memoir Monday... The Other Wes Moore

The Other Wes Moore by Wes Moore

One Name, Two Fates...

Two young men who didn't know each other, growing up in the same tough neighborhood, in the same city, about the same age, but whose lives would turn out drastically differently... Oh and coincidentally, both young men shared the same name - Wes Moore.

"On December 11, 2000, The Baltimore Sun ran an article about how Wes, despite his troubled childhood, had just received The Rhodes Scholarship. At the same time, The Sun was running stories —eventually more than 100 in all—about four African-American men who were arrested for the murder of an off-duty Baltimore police officer during an armed robbery. One of the men convicted was just two years older than Wes, lived in the same neighborhood, and in an uncanny turn, was also named Wes Moore..." ...About the Author from his website

From Publisher's Weekly... 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...

When Wes Moore the author read about the "other" Wes Moore, he was curious - how could two men with similar backgrounds, with the same name, turn out so differently. He wrote to the "other" Wes Moore in prison and got a response... This book sounds so interesting to me. Does this bring up the age old question of Nature versus Nurture? And how the choices we make always have consequences... sometimes good, sometimes not so good.

This book was published this past April with glowing reviews. It's available in hardcover right now, but is scheduled to be released in paperback at the end of the year (Dec. 2010). And of course, this book is Kindle Ready!