Men We Reaped

Men We Reaped: A Memoir by Jesmyn Ward
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Memoirs are hard to review and I say I don't really like them but I read a lot of them. I do think I learn a lot about how different people think and what they learn from experiences that are so different from mine and then not so different. Witnessing them work through their traumas and relationships can kind of feel like voyeurism and sometimes I don't come to the same conclusions they do and how do I judge that? This memoir of Jesmyn's early life and tribute to five young men who died young is tragic and sad. But it is so well written. You can see Ward's talent jumping off the page. My one purely editorial criticism is that I wish she would have woven in some more of the young men's lives with her own narrative a little bit better. We often only meet these persons in the pages of their tribute chapter The death of her brother which she memorializes last and does show up in her narrative passages made his death really hit you. Again,it's not a happy book but she writes with such candor and beauty that it transcends the sadness of the material.

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If energy is neither created nor destroyed, and if your brother was here with his, his humor, his kindness, his hopes, doesn't this mean that what he was still exists somewhere, even if it's not here?  Doesn't it?

We crawled through time like roaches through the linings of walls, the neglected spaces and hours, foolishly happy that we were alive even as we did everything to die.

How the privilege of my education, my eventual ascent into another class, was born in the inexorable push of my mother's hands.  How unfair it all seemed.