Men We Reaped: A Heart-Wrenching Memoir of Loss and Resilience

Al: Libro normale, tutto ok!

Italy on Dec 23, 2022

Rutvika: Wonderful memoir, I cannot imagine the courage required to relive these incidents while writing them again and so beautifully written.

India on Dec 13, 2020

Alexis: A MUST READ MEMOIR!!! Should be added to BLM movement

United Kingdom on Jul 18, 2020

Dri: This book is wonderfully written with so much pain but with so much bravery. Highly recommend this book to black men and women.

United Kingdom on Jun 09, 2020

DodgilyArtful: Devastating grief memoir. Ms Ward is unflinching in detailing the impact her brother's death had on her and her family. It's a brave and raw telling of a tragic and deeply personal story.

If I have a quibble it's that I wasn't always 100% convinced by the broadening of the story. Of course there are socio-economic links between the five men who died and whose stories are told her. The suffocating poverty and racism is undeniable, but I wasn't always comfortable with the juxtaposition of deaths in road accidents with gang violence, drug overdose and suicidal depression. It's a fine work, nevertheless.

United Kingdom on Feb 12, 2018

Donna Peizer: I found this book difficult to read and must acknowledge my own discomfort with the seemingly unrelenting darkness that hovered over the young people in this story as they grew into adulthood (including the author herself). And yet . . . against all odds Ward had been able to obtain a first-rate education and launch a literary career. Admittedly, she did have a benefactor, but she was the one who made the choice to take advantage of what was offered, and I suspect she made that choice not once, but many times over. One wonders what the five young men might have made of their lives if not blinded by negative cultural expectations handed down generation after generation, robbing them of the ability to see choices that may have been there for them. Perhaps just as importantly, the ease of simply numbing out on drugs and alcohol, which seemed ubiquitous, can rob individuals of all motivation and a community of its collective ability to provide a stable support structure for its youth.

Joshua dropped out of school in the 9th grade. Education must be addressed as a threshold matter if tragedies of this nature are to be prevented in the future. Public schools are all too happy to...

United States on Oct 31, 2013

Eric Selby: "I knew that I lived in a place where hope and a sense of possibility were as ephemeral as morning fog, but I did not see the despair at the heart of our drug use," writes Jesmyn Ward of the area in Mississippi where she and her three siblings as well as their large extended family grew up and where most of them--the ones who have survived that is--still live. "Men We Reaped" is a poignant retelling not only of the author's family's lives but centered around the tragic deaths of five black young men within the span of five years, beginning with her only brother's death in 2000.
She uses the wolf as her metaphor, the original name of the town was Wolf. And as her ex-boyfriend said, "They picking us off, one by one." The reader experiences, although not chronologically, the deaths of these men: accidents, suicide, a shooting...
When the writer describes her womanizing father's love of pit bulls that he collected for the purpose of fighting other dogs, one becomes aware of the sadistic nature of this man in the scene where he cuts off one dog's tail without benefit of sedation. And that will lead into much more about the realities of just how awful life had to have been for all...

United States on Sep 29, 2013