Men We Reaped

Named one of the Best Books of the Century by New York Magazine

Two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward (Salvage the Bones, Sing, Unburied, Sing) contends with the deaths of five young men dear to her, and the risk of being a black man in the rural South.

"We saw the lightning and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns; 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 realized 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 agonizing 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.

Author: Jesmyn Ward
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 09/17/2013
Pages: 272
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.89lbs
Size: 8.54h x 5.90w x 1.09d
ISBN: 9781608195213


Award: Indies Choice Book Awards - Honor Book
Award: Dayton Literary Peace Prize - Finalist
Award: National Book Critics Circle Award - Finalist
Award: Hurston/Wright LEGACY Award - Nominee


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 04/01/2013 pg. 59
Kirkus Reviews 05/01/2013
Kirkus Bea Big Book Guide 05/15/2013 pg. 36
Publishers Weekly 06/24/2013
Entertainment Weekly 08/02/2013 pg. 69
Booklist 08/01/2013 pg. 21
Kirkus Reviews Fall Preview 08/15/2013 pg. 31
Library Journal 09/01/2013 pg. 111
Essence 10/01/2013 pg. 86
New York Times Book Review 09/15/2013 pg. 14
Entertainment Weekly 09/20/2013 pg. 156
New York Times Book Review 09/22/3013 pg. 30
Shelf Awareness 09/27/2013
Publishers Weekly Best Books 11/04/2013 pg. 20
Kirkus Best Nonfiction 12/01/2013 pg. 39
Shelf Awareness 12/13/2013
NY Times Notable Bks of Year 12/08/2013 pg. 28
Entertainment Weekly 01/24/2014 pg. 21
BookPage 09/01/2013

About the Author
Jesmyn Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan and is currently a professor of creative writing at Tulane University. She is the author of the novels Where the Line Bleeds and Salvage the Bones, which won the 2011 National Book Award, and Sing, Unburied, Sing, which won the 2017 National Book Award. She is also the editor of the anthology The Fire This Time and the author of the memoir Men We Reaped, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. From 2008-2010, Ward had a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. She was the John and Renée Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi for the 2010-2011 academic year. In 2016, the American Academy of Arts and Letters selected Ward for the Strauss Living Award. She lives in Mississippi.