Previous
Intro
Discovering Wes Moore is memoir focusing on the author’s childhood up through his college years. Wes Moore was born in the 1970s in Baltimore, where his beloved father dies when Wes is only three years old. Struggling to raise Wes and his sisters by herself, Wes’s mother, Joy, moves her family in with her parents in the Bronx. As a boy, Wes is torn between the street culture in his predominantly Black neighborhood and the rich, White environment of the private school his mother sends him too. He eventually turns his back on the school and heads down a path of juvenile delinquency in his neighborhood, which experiences high crime rates.
Much to Wes’s dismay, Joy sends him to military school, where he eventually turns his life around and embraces the strict military ethos and code of honor. Wes gets a scholarship to Johns Hopkins University, and during his college years he has a transformative semester abroad in South Africa and an internship with Baltimore Mayor Schmoke. Mayor Schmoke convinces him to apply for the Rhodes Scholarship for graduate study at Oxford, which Wes wins.
Many years later, he follows up on a news item that occurred when he was in South Africa and which has always haunted him since: a man from his area of Baltimore, who coincidentally shares Wes’s name, received a sentence of life in prison for murdering a police officer during a robbery. Wes writes to this other Wes Moore and eventually interviews him in prison many times. He’s struck by how similar their stories are: the other Wes grew up in the same area as Wes (the author), also without a father, and he had a similarly delinquent youth, despite his keen intelligence. The author reflects on how easily he and the other Wes could have switched places in life. He attributes his success, as opposed to the other Wes’s tragic failure, to having inspiring mentors who made him realize his own power of choice in life. He hopes that in writing this memoir, he will make the reader recognize that they too possess this power of choice.
