The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates (Unabridged) The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates (Unabridged)

The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates (Unabridged‪)‬

    • 4.3 • 180 Ratings
    • $12.99

    • $12.99

Publisher Description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the governor of Maryland, the “compassionate” (People), “startling” (Baltimore Sun), “moving” (Chicago Tribune) true story of two kids with the same name from the city: One went on to be a Rhodes Scholar, decorated combat veteran, White House Fellow, and business leader. The other is serving a life sentence in prison.
 
Selected by Stephen Curry as his “Underrated” Book Club Pick with Literati


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.

GENRE
Biographies & Memoirs
NARRATOR
WM
Wes Moore
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
06:12
hr min
RELEASED
2010
April 27
PUBLISHER
Random House Audio
SIZE
384.2
MB

Customer Reviews

Clark02176 ,

Thought-provoking

I enjoyed this book more than I thought I would — it is engaging, well-written, and thought-provoking. The two parallel stories were fascinating and detailed, and I appreciated the author’s insight into the other Wes Moore’s life. It was confusing at times to keep all the characters straight, and I don’t feel I really ever understood the main turning points of the two stories — what moments made this Wes take this path, and that Wes take that path? The final takeaways are fairly obvious but deserve repeating a thousand times. My only beef with the audiobook is that authors don’t always make great readers, and this author. Tends to break. Many of the sentences. Into tiny bits. Particularly. Early on. In the reading. This gets better after a few chapters, but remains a slightly annoying problem throughout. I especially loved how he read dialogue because it’s an accent he clearly grew up speaking and it made the story that much more real to hear the characters speaking in authentic voices. This book is definitely worth reading/hearing.

TheDarkMartian ,

Amazing story

It is an amazing story that really changes how I saw this and it was neat to watch both Wes’s change throughout there lives

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