So much happens in this relatively short book, there are so many shrewd details, that it could have simply been a straightforward memoir of Ms. Ward’s life ... This at times somber book is also shot through with life, with a sense of rural community and what it felt like to be adolescent and footloose on hot Mississippi nights, all the beer cans and weed and loud music and easy sex and rolled-down car windows ... Ms. Ward occasionally presses her thumb down too hard on this material, forcing meanings that were plain already, but these lapses are rare ... Men We Reaped reaffirms Ms. Ward’s substantial talent. It’s an elegiac book that’s rangy at the same time.
Men We Reaped is a somber, slender book about grief and mourning and the blight of racism and poverty in DeLisle, Miss. ... An often beautiful book, perhaps most moving when Ward writes about growing up in food-stamp-level poverty and the dissolution of her parents’ marriage. It also puts the full beam of Ward’s literary vision on the lives and expectations of rural black people in the Deep South, perhaps one of the smallest bookshelves in the library ... She’s great at describing her familial migration and disintegration — her tact is more literary than journalistic, and it works.
Jesmyn Ward's superb memoir Men We Reaped finds powerful new meaning in Tubman's words, which serve as a still-relevant metaphor for the Southern black American experience ... Ward's deceptively conversational prose masks her uncommon skill at imagery. She makes you feel the anguish of each lost life, as well as her survivor's guilt, with its ever-present haunt of memory ... Ward capably, sensitively covers many important subjects — from the fragility of African-American manhood, to the expectations of familial responsibility, to the difficulties of living in both the white and black worlds ... In each vignette, she's often silent, but always watching and processing. She's candid enough to paint the flaws in the deceased as well as their good qualities...She's also talented enough to turn such prose into poetry.
Because the story jumps back and forth in time, at points, characters already dead reappear; we see their futures before they do and anxiously await their tragedy ... Ward writes as both a careful observer and primary character. Her portraits are sharp and loving. While she pinpoints the destruction caused by infidelity, drugs, and poverty in her own family, Ward honors her parents’ ambitions, dedication, and dreams, naming obstacles that stood in their way ... One of Ward’s greatest accomplishments here is the way she dissects the complicated roles of black men and women, as they relate to her own family and friends. The history of oppression, Ward writes, leads black men to seek 'a sense of freedom or a sense of power that being a Black man in the South denied them' and contributes to 'the tradition of men leaving their families.'
...Jesmyn Ward attempts to give both humanity and context in her memoir, in which she relates the unconnected deaths in the space of just four years of five young men who were close to her ... By virtue of a restrained but rich style and gift for storytelling, her book does not read like the litany of woe that one might expect. Melancholic and introspective rather than morbid and self-indulgent, it is really a story of what it is like to grow up smart, poor, black and female in America's deep south ... The book's structure, however, hollows out much of its emotional impact ... The Men We Reaped is an eloquent account of a psychological, sociological and political condition all too often dismissed as an enduring pathology.
This book reminds us that life is hard, and harder still for those who have to wonder what the value of life is ... Ward's words are heavy, profound and honest. They take us beyond the news headlines that often strip young black men of their humanity. The book grants a fuller look at the epidemic of black men who die young from the perspective of those who loved them through right and wrong.
Jesmyn Ward, with an honesty few other writers often express, bravely recounts her own story of being an African American living in poverty in rural Mississippi over the last few decades ... Ward convincingly transports the reader to the steamy woods of the bayou and gulf regions of Mississippi and Louisiana, all filled with crowded homes, mosquito-filled backyards and sweaty parties in the park ... The book’s dizzying structure occasionally jars the reader through a series of time warps as the chapters detailing each man’s death interrupt her linear life story ... for her to live, her story needs to be processed personally and then told. In Men We Reaped, she reveals that journey and why it is important her story is told through the loss of these men.
Ward fills almost every page of Men We Reaped with lyrical descriptions of the people and the land, much as she did with her 2011 novel Salvage the Bones, which won the National Book Award...at once a coming-of-age story and a kind of mourning song ... Men We Reaped is filled with many such intimate and familial moments, each described with the passion and precision of the polished novelist Ward has become ... Ward is one of those rare writers who’s traveled across America’s deepening class rift with her sense of truth intact. What she gives back to her community is the hurtful honesty of the best literary art.
Nowhere is Ward’s radiant tenderness as evident as in her portrait of her father ... Ward’s background as a novelist serves her well in these vignettes. Her prose is poised, unshowy, mostly in control of the social agonies it illuminates ... There are truths in Men We Reaped that no amount of sociological reports or thundering op-ed columns could reveal.
Ward doesn’t seek to cast blame or pick up a political cause. Rather, she pierces the surface of each man’s story the way a bird breaks the surface of tidewaters. Her straightforward, unadorned writing reveals the raw facts ... Ward masters many of the finer points of memoir, the descriptive detail and dialogue. However, writing about the lives of five loosely connected men without relying on chronological order for structure presents an enormous challenge ... At times readers may feel like they’ve been drinking walk-me-downs and trying to walk down the steps, a little tipsy in terms of how late it is and what year it could be ... Circling around the facts of their lives, a seabird in search of stories, Ward dives in and out of her childhood, snatching memories and laying them bare on the page.
Bewilderment, pain, rage and resentment flow through the bones of Men We Reaped ... Searingly honest and brutal, Ward holds nothing back as she strives to find her way in a community that she both loves and hates. There are no platitudes for her as she comes to terms with her losses ... She makes her readers feel that pain, too; but more than that, she makes us understand that these men mattered—that their lives were worth something after all.
In this riveting memoir of the ghosts that haunt her hometown in Mississippi, two-time novelist and National Book Award–winner Ward 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. ... Ward beautifully incorporates the pain and guilt woven into 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.
An assured yet scarifying memoir by young, supremely gifted novelist Ward ... Ward writes, achingly, painting portraits of characters such as a young daredevil of a man who proclaimed to anyone who would listen, 'I ain’t long for this world,' and another who shrank into bony nothingness as crack cocaine whittled him away ... Beautifully written, if sometimes too sad to bear.
