Other Wes Moore (Moore)

Book Reviews
The author emphasizes that the point of his book is not to depict a "good" Wes Moore and a "bad" Wes Moore. He says he wanted to illustrate not the differences between their lives but the similarities, particularly what it's like to grow up without a father in the house — an experience he shares with an estimated one out of three children, according to 2009 U.S. Census Bureau data. Moore's hope is that his story will encourage Americans to step in at crucial moments to help other troubled 12-year-olds. "It's not a race issue," he says. "It's a national issue which threatens the future of the United States. We're spending billions on prisons. Mathematically, it's unsustainable."
Deirdre Donahue - USA Today

(Starred review.) 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.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) 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 [and] prison.... Moore ends this haunting look at two lives with a call to action and a detailed resource guide. —Vanessa Bush
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