Men We Reaped
A Memoir
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- 10,99 €
Publisher Description
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'A brutal, moving memoir … Anyone who emerges from America's black working-class youth with words as fine as Ward's deserves a hearing' - Guardian
'Raw, beautiful and dangerous' - New York Times Book Review
'Lavishly endowed with literary craft and hard-earned wisdom' - Time
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The beautiful, haunting memoir from Jesmyn Ward, the first woman to win the National Book Award twice
'And then we heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped' - Harriet Tubman
Jesmyn Ward's acclaimed memoir shines a light on the community she comes from in the small town of DeLisle, Mississippi, a place of quiet beauty and fierce attachment. Here, in the space of four years, she lost five young black men dear to her, including her beloved brother – to accidents, murder and suicide.
Their deaths were seemingly unconnected, yet their lives had been connected by identity and place. As Jesmyn dealt with these losses, she came to a staggering truth: the fates of these young men were predetermined by who they were and where they were from, because racism and economic struggle breed a certain kind of bad luck.
The agonising reality brought Jesmyn to write, at last, their true stories and her own.
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'Acute and often beautiful' - Financial Times
'Haunting' - Laurie Penny, New Statesman Books of the Year
'Elegiac, rage-filled, and uncommonly brave' - Vogue
'A brilliant book about beauty and death' - Los Angeles Times
'Essential' - San Francisco Chronicle
'Burns with brilliance' - Harper's Bazaar
'Unvarnished and penetrating' - Elle
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this riveting memoir of the ghosts that haunt her hometown in Mississippi, two-time novelist and National Book Award winner Ward (Salvage the Bones) writes intimately about the pall of blighted opportunity, lack of education, and circular poverty that hangs over the young, vulnerable African-American inhabitants of DeLisle, Miss., who are reminiscent of the characters in Ward's fictionalized Bois Sauvage. The five young black men featured here are the author's dear friends and her younger brother, whose deaths between 2000 and 2004 were "seemingly unrelated," but all linked to drug and alcohol abuse, depression, and a general "lack of trust" in the ability of society and, ultimately, family and friends to nurture them. The first to die (though his story is told last in the book) was her brother, Joshua, a handsome man who didn't do as well in school as Ward and was stuck back home, doing odd jobs while his sister attended Stanford and later moved to N.Y.C. Joshua died senselessly after being struck by a drunk driver on a dark coastal road one night. The "wolf" that tracked all of these young men and the author, too, when she experienced the isolation of being black at predominantly white schools was the sense of how little their lives mattered. Ward beautifully incorporates the pain and guilt woven her and her brother's lives by the absence and failure of their father, forcing their mother to work as a housekeeper to keep the family afloat. Ward has a soft touch, making these stories heartbreakingly real through vivid portrayal and dialogue.
