The Other Wes Moore

I'm on a roll this week - two books!  Two friends recommended this book to me, and it came to the library for me, so I had to finish it before it was due back.

The Other Wes Moore is about two young black men with the same name who grew up in Baltimore about the same time (not knowing each other at the time) who ended up on very different life paths.  The author of the book ended up as a Rhodes Scholar from Johns Hopkins, the other is serving a life sentence for armed robbery.

The author has painstakingly researched the life of the "other" Wes and has chronicled their two lives in tandem.  Both Wes Moores grew up without fathers in their lives, both had loving mothers, neither had money.  Yet one made good, the other, not.

I felt as though most of the book gave pretty detailed information about the two lives, up to a point, but then at the end, it sort of petered out.  The author, in the end, asks himself how he got to be where he is, and the other Wes ended up where he did.  He says, in one sentence, that he has no idea.

That surprised me because I felt as though he answered that question in the book.  He had grandparents who had a little bit of wherewithal (they owned a home) and his mother took a proactive stand and sacrificed a great deal to get her son the help he needed by sending him to military school.  I think that made the world of difference between the two stories.

I am sure this book would give book clubs many topics to discuss.