Websites
- Wes Moore Shares His Story - PBS Wes Moore is a NYT bestselling author, army combat veteran and youth advocate. Find out how he turned an unlikely relationship with a man who shares his name into a tool to help set at-risk youth along the right path.
Reviews & Articles
- Memoirs In Black: Young Black Men Talk Of Growing Up Black In America Carson reviews The Beautiful Struggle by Ta-Nehisi Coates; A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison by R. Dwayne Betts; Losing My Cool: How a Father's Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture by Thomas Chatterton Williams; and The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates by Wes Moore.
- The Other Wes Moore Review Book Review-Favorable
- THE OTHER WES MOORE: One Name and Two Fates--A Story of Tragedy and Hope. 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. (Author tour to Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Boston, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco. Agent: David Black/David Black Literary Agency)
- The Work: Creating Success in New and Meaningful Ways An American student at Oxford after 9/11. A combat officer in Afghanistan. Special assistant to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. An Obama campaigner. A Wall Street banker. And now a community activist in his hometown, Baltimore. As already suggested in his hugely best-selling first book, The Other Wes Moore, Moore has come far from his days as a fatherless boy on the streets, and he's had some cliff-hanging moments along the way. Here he tells his life story to help others, especially young people, struggling with the question, "What is my work?" A 12-city tour; pushed back from April 2014.
The Other Wes Moore
The chilling truth is that his story could have been mine. The tragedy is that my story could have been his.
In December 2000, the Baltimore Sun ran a small piece about Wes Moore, a local student who had just received a Rhodes Scholarship. The same paper also ran a series of articles about four young men who had allegedly killed a police officer in a spectacularly botched armed robbery. The police were still hunting for two of the suspects who had gone on the lam, a pair of brothers. One was named Wes Moore.
Wes just couldn’t shake off the unsettling coincidence, or the inkling that the two shared much more than space in the same newspaper. After following the story of the robbery, the manhunt, and the trial to its conclusion, he wrote a letter to the other Wes, now a convicted murderer serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole. His letter tentatively asked the questions that had been haunting him: Who are you? How did this happen?
That letter led to a correspondence and relationship that have lasted for several years. Over dozens of letters and prison visits, Wes discovered that the other Wes had had a life not unlike his own: Both had had difficult childhoods, both were fatherless; they’d hung out on similar corners with similar crews, and both had run into trouble with the police. At each stage of their young lives they had come across similar moments of decision, yet their choices would lead them to astonishingly different destinies.
Told in alternating dramatic 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.
Text is from the Author's Amazon book page