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Men We Reaped
- A Memoir
- Narrated by: January LaVoy
- Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins
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Publisher's Summary
Bloomsbury presents Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward, read by January LaVoy.
"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)
In five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five young men in her life - to drugs, accidents, suicide and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, particularly Black men. Dealing with these losses, one after another, made Jesmyn ask the question: why? And as she began to write about the experience of living through all the dying, she realised the truth - and it took her breath away. Her brother and her friends all died because of who they were and where they were from, because they lived with a history of racism and economic struggle that fostered drug addiction and the dissolution of family and relationships. Jesmyn says the answer was so obvious she felt stupid for not seeing it. But it nagged at her until she knew she had to write about her community, to write their stories and her own.
Jesmyn grew up in poverty in rural Mississippi. She writes powerfully about the pressures this brings, on the men who can do no right and the women who stand in for family in a society where the men are often absent. She bravely tells her story, revisiting the agonising losses of her only brother and her friends. As the sole member of her family to leave home and pursue higher education, she writes about this parallel American universe with the objectivity distance provides and the intimacy of utter familiarity. A brutal world rendered beautifully, Jesmyn Ward’s memoir will sit comfortably alongside Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I'm Dying, Tobias Wolff's This Boy’s Life, and Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
Critic Reviews
"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)
"When I first read her memoir, Men We Reaped - about five young black men, all of whom died within a span of four years in her life - I understood the weight of grief as one struggles to live.... She is a modern-day William Faulkner, painting tapestries of an America that has not been heard." (Lee Daniels, Oscar-nominated director and producer)
"Raw, beautiful and dangerous [...] Ward's singular voice and her full embrace of her anger and sorrow set this work apart from those that have trodden similar ground." (New York Times Book Review)
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What listeners say about Men We Reaped
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Rafaela Padial
- 10-03-2023
Beautiful and Gut-wrenching
As with all of Jesmyn Ward’s books, Men We Reaped is beautifully, even poetically, written. But beyond the writing, this book is an honest and, at times, brutal look at the many trials still faced by poor black families in the US. It is personal and political. It is a story of grief, and also love. It is both relatable and eye-opening. I honestly can’t recommend it enough. Please just read it.
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