The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates

Wes Moore, the author, was born in Baltimore and raised by his mother and grandparents after the death of his father.  As a teenager, on the verge of making some poor decisions in his life, Moore was sent to military school by his mother.  He went on to become a leader at the school, a Johns Hopkins graduate, a Rhodes scholar, and a soldier in Afghanistan.

The other Wes Moore was also born in Baltimore in the same year as the author.  Raised by his mother after the early disappearance of his father, he started selling drugs on the street at an early age.  Ultimately, as part of a crew that robbed a jewelry store and killed an off-duty police officer, Moore earned a life sentence in prison.

When the author, on an exchange trip to South Africa, learned from his mother about the existence of another man—a man with the same name, the same birth year, the same birth date, but such a different fate—he became intrigued.  He began a correspondence with the prisoner, and he eventually conducted a series of interviews that became the foundation of the book.

In alternating between his own story and that of the other Wes Moore, the author attempts to answer the crucial question:  How did these two men, with such similar backgrounds, turn out so differently?

While the premise is interesting and the question is important, the writing itself fails to engage.  I can understand why multiple colleges chose to assign this book to their students, but I can also imagine those students setting the book aside frequently (as I did) because it just didn’t hold their attention.  I couldn’t make it through more than one chapter in a sitting, and I often stopped reading after only half a chapter.

What’s more (sorry—no pun intended), Moore provides no answer to the very question he poses with the book.  He acknowledges this fact—and he acknowledges the difficulty of finding one simple answer to such a complex issue—but the vague theories he posits in the afterword left me disappointed.

Spiegelman’s two-volume work (My Father Bleeds History and And Here my Troubles Began) tells the story of Vladek Spiegelman, the author’s father, a Polish Jew who survived Auschwitz and Dachau. 

What sets this book apart from other histories of the Holocaust is Spiegelman’s choice to tell his father’s story in comic-book form.  Spiegelman draws the Jews as mice and the Nazis as cats.  (The French appear–naturally–as frogs, and the American troops are dogs.)  Though this sounds like it could never work, Maus is one of the most moving accounts of the Holocaust that I have ever read.

The book covers the meeting of Vladek and his wife (Anja), their marriage, their life in a luxurious home with their extended family, the birth of their first son, the loss of their grandparents, the loss of their parents, the loss of their son, the horrors of the concentration camps, their struggle and luck to stay alive, their liberation, and their reunion after the war.

All of this is framed by conversations between Art and Vladek Spiegelman, set in New York decades after the war.  Through these conversations, Spiegelman reveals the pain that filled his father’s life (including the pain caused by the suicide of his wife) long years after the camps.

Seriously.  Read this.  Now.

The Invention of Hugo Cabret

In many ways, Wonderstruck follows the format established in Selznick’s Caldecott-winning Hugo Cabret: the blend of text and graphite art, the two storylines that eventually twine together, the hidden places of the big city, the loss and discovery of childhood.

After the sudden death of his mother, twelve-year-old Ben finds himself living with his aunt and uncle in small-town Minnesota.  On a stormy, lightning-filled night, he discovers a clue about his father—a man he has never met—in one of his mother’s old books.  With the help of his cousin, Ben quickly packs a bag and runs away to New York City in search of his father.

While Ben’s story dominates the text of the book, the illustrations (at least for the first two-thirds of the book) are all about Rose, a young deaf girl living in New Jersey in 1927, 50 years before Ben’s story begins.  She also leaves home to make her way to New York, searching for a famous actress from the era of silent films.

Eventually, expectedly, the two stories converge.  In the process, wolves, stars, and the American Museum of Natural History play important parts.

If you don’t know what Comic Sans is, this book definitely isn’t for you.

But if you ever think about all the font choices in the drop-down menu of Word, or if (even better) you’re interested in graphic design, Simon Garfield’s Just My Type might just be for you.

Though a book on fonts sounds like a hard sell, this “international bestseller” is a cornucopia of fascinating knowledge—about the history of print, about the process of hand-forging metal letters that dates back to the days of Guttenberg, about the digitization of print, about the famous (and infamous) names in print design, about the power of a good font.

Though friends thought that this book sounded like a sure cure for insomnia, it was Just My Type.

I am the poet of the body,
And I am the poet of the soul.

          * * * * *

I hear and behold God in every object,
yet I understand God not in the least,
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.

Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass;
I find letters from God dropped in the street, and every one is signed by God’s name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that others will punctually
come forever and ever.

          * * * * *

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then . . . I contradict myself;
I am large . . . I contain multitudes.

          * * * * *

Who has done his day’s work and will soonest be through with his supper?
Who wishes to walk with me?

Will you speak before I am gone?  Will you prove already too late?

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me . . . he complains of my gab
and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed . . . I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

The last scud of day holds back for me,
It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadowed wilds,
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

I depart as air . . . I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop some where waiting for you.

Taken from the poem “Cant,” here’s a quick sample:

O, gods of fear!  Are we arrogant to believe the world will end in our
     lifetimes, as if we in all of history were so important to pull a chair
     up to the big exeunt?

THE WEATHER IN SPACE   

Is God being or pure force?  The wind

Or what commands it?  When our lives slow

And we can hold all that we love, it sprawls

In our laps like a gangly doll.  When the storm

Kicks up and nothing is ours, we go chasing

After all we’re certain to lose, so alive—

Faces radiant with panic.

THE SPEED OF BELIEF

I didn’t want to wait on my knees
In a room made quiet by waiting.

A room where we’d listen for the rise
Of breath, the burble in his throat.

I didn’t want the orchids or the trays
Of food meant to fortify that silence,

Or to pray for him to stay or to go then
Finally toward that ecstatic light.

I didn’t want to believe
What we believe in those rooms:

That we are blessed, letting go,
Letting someone, anyone,

Drag open the drapes and heave us
Back into our blinding, bright lives.

from NO-FLY ZONE

Once upon a time, a woman told this to her daughter:

Save yourself.  The girl didn’t think to ask for what?

She looked into her mother’s face and answered Yes.

Years later, alone in the room where she lives

The daughter listens to the life she’s been saved from:

Evening patter.  Summer laughter.  Young bodies

Racing into the unmitigated happiness of danger.

THE GOOD LIFE

When some people talk about money
They speak as if it were a mysterious lover
Who went out to buy milk and never
Came back, and it makes me nostalgic
For the years I lived on coffee and bread,
Hungry all the time, walking to work on payday
Like a woman journeying for water
From a village without a well, then living
One or two nights like everyone else
On roast chicken and red wine.

US & CO.

We are here for what amounts to a few hours,

                                                                        a day at most.

We feel around making sense of the terrain,
                       
                                                                        our own new limbs,

Bumping up against a herd of bodies

                                                                        until one becomes home.

Moments sweep past.  The grass bends

                                                                        then learns to stand again.

Some of my other favorites include “Don’t You Wonder, Sometimes,” “Willed in Autumn,” and “Alternate Take.”  Since closing the book, I just keep thinking about the poems—always the sign of something special.

STYX

 

You put a bag around your head and walked into the river.
You

 

walked into the river with a bag around your head and you were
never dead,
           in your land of scythe and snow—

 

game on the banks of your
mental styx

 

for the double
audience

 

of smoke—

 

    —–

You pressed a coin into his palm and stepped across the water.
You

stepped across the water with a hand on his arm and he was
silent and kind as you
           shoved off, toward the smoky coils

of the greek-seeming dead—
You’d been trying to sleep.

Found yourself here
in the mythocryptic land—

The river

                     —–

had widened to a lake.  You were anchored
in the shallow boat

by his faceless weight—
And on the green shore you could see their vapored

residue, how they could
smell it, those two:  if you

                     —–

slit your wrist you could make them speak.

Much of Levine’s free-verse poetry focuses on working class characters from his native Detroit, but this collection also includes men returning from war and rebels in Barcelona.