Men We Reaped: A Memoir - Hardcover

Jesmyn Ward

4.3

23,696 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1408830485 ISBN 13: 9781408830482

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing (UK), 2014

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Within the span of five years, the National Book Award-winning author of Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing lost her brother and four other young men in her life - to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty. Dealing with these losses, one after another, made Jesmyn Ward ask the question: Why? As the sole member of her family to leave home and pursue higher education, Ward reflects in this National Book Critics Circle-nominated memoir on the parallel American universe that she experienced growing up poor in Mississippi, a world of broken homes where black men struggle to escape the limitations that racism has imposed upon them.

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About the Author:

Jesmyn Ward grew up in DeLisle, Mississippi. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan and has been a Stegner Fellow at Stanford and a Grisham Visiting Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi. She is currently an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of South Alabama. She is the author of the novels Where the Line Bleeds and Salvage the Bones, which won the 2011 National Book Award for fiction.

Review:

Powerful non-fiction from the Deep South ... Ward's voice, bluesy and poised, rises occasionally to an unashamed howl of pity. It also glows with love for DeLisle, Mississippi, which she cannot bear to leave * Intelligent Life * Her powerful, chatty memoir blends the story of her escape to university and the writing life, with the lives of five men whose deaths are anything but exceptional in a divided America * New Statesman * Jesmyn Ward is an alchemist. She transmutes pain and loss into gold. Men We Reaped illustrates hardships but thankfully, vitally, it's just as clear about the humor, the intelligence, the tenderness, the brilliance of the folks in DeLisle, Mississippi. A community that's usually wiped off the literary map can't be erased when its in a book this good * Victor LaValle, author of The Devil in Silver * An assured yet scarifying memoir by young, supremely gifted novelist [Jesmyn] Ward.... With more gumption than many, Ward battled not only the indifferent odds of rural poverty, but also the endless racism of her classmates.... A modern rejoinder to Black Like Me, Beloved and other stories of struggle and redemption-beautifully written, if sometimes too sad to bear * Kirkus Reviews * There's something of Faulkner to Ward's grand diction * Observer * Men We Reaped is a fiercely felt meditation on the value of life that at once reminds us of its infinite worth and indicts us - as a society - for our selective, casual complicity in devaluing it. Ward's account of these losses is founded in a compelling emotional honesty, and graced with moments of stark poetry * Peter Ho Davies, author of The Welsh Girl * Not just a stylistic literary masterpiece but an unanswerable indictment of American inhumanity ... Lesser beings would have been driven into despair by the author's experience but she has kept cool, never surrendering to bitterness and hatred, and has done us a huge favour by producing this profound noble and purifying work ... Our young people need to be subjected to well-meaning exhortations to behave in a civilised manner to each other - they should read and learn from masterpieces like Men We Reaped * Robert Govender, New World *

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