juliadejong's review against another edition
4.0
4.5* absolutely beautiful. I just got confused about time and everyone's age quite often. I do understand why she wrote it that way though, because going backwards in time and ending the book with her brother's death added to the experience of reading the book.
amyripley's review against another edition
5.0
Haven’t cried this much reading a book in a while. And the fact that Jesmyn Ward has experienced this much loss and then her husband died this year is unfathomable.
litgirlliv's review against another edition
3.0
Finally I have my hands and all my attention on a Jesmyn Ward book. I feel guilty that it's taken so long. That said, I was left a little disappointed. For a good chunk of my reading experience, I couldn't help but relate this book to Heavy by Kiese Laymon and flag all the many ways it fell short in comparison. Like Heavy, this memoir is set in rural Mississippi and centers themes of Blackness, poverty, gender, and family. Unlike Heavy, this memoir doesn't do all the work of connecting the author's experiences to broader social commentary. There is a reading guide at the end that invites the reader to do this work on their own, and that's helpful but also dissatisfying. Truthfully, unless you're on Beyonce-level celebrity status, vignettes of your personal life are not by themselves enriching narratives. To reach enrichment you have to douse your personal experiences with reflection and emotion that transcend your personal experiences and reach a level of social commentary. While there were several bits of this memoir that I enjoyed (particularly the last chapter), I consistently longed for it do so much more, and at times I even found it dry.
For what it's worth, I noted that Roxane Gay captured a similar flaw within her own review. She writes, "Where it falls short is that it doesn't do enough to rise above the grief. Ward only briefly addresses the issues of race and poverty and how they indelibly shape too many lives, particularly in the rural South. Instead, that the culprits of these men's demise is inextricably bound to race is treated as assumption when it needs to be far more fully realized and plainly articulated."
For what it's worth, I noted that Roxane Gay captured a similar flaw within her own review. She writes, "Where it falls short is that it doesn't do enough to rise above the grief. Ward only briefly addresses the issues of race and poverty and how they indelibly shape too many lives, particularly in the rural South. Instead, that the culprits of these men's demise is inextricably bound to race is treated as assumption when it needs to be far more fully realized and plainly articulated."
elsanore's review against another edition
5.0
Men We Reaped is heartbreaking and wonderfully crafted, a memoir of being poor and black in the South within my generation.
shelfimprovement's review against another edition
4.0
This was lovely, but not as soul-crushing as I'd expected.
samlo28's review against another edition
oof. this book is written in such a way that i felt like i was intruding on ward’s life, like i was reading something that i shouldn’t have. it oozes grief and despair.
cherylcheng00's review against another edition
5.0
In the sixties, men and women began to divorce, and women who'd grown up with the expectation that they'd have partners to help them raise their children found themselves with none. They worked like men then, and raised their children the best they could, while their former husbands had relationships with other women and married them and then left them also, perhaps searching for a sense of freedom or a sense of power that being a Black man in the South denied them. If they were not called "sir" in public, at least they could be respected and feared and wanted by the women and children who loved them. They were devalued everywhere except in the home, and this is the place where they turned the paradigm on its head and devalued those in their thrall. The result of this, of course, was that the women who were so devalued had to be inhumanly strong and foster a sense of family alone.
This tradition of men leaving their families here seems systemic, fostered by endemic poverty. Sometimes color seems an accidental factor, but then it doesn't, especially when one thinks of the forced fracturing of families that the earliest African Americans endured under the yoke of slavery.
What I did not understand then was that the same pressures were weighing on us all. My entire community suffered from a lack of trust: we didn't trust society to provide the basics of a good education, safety, access to good jobs, fairness in the justice system. And even as we distrusted the society around us, the culture that cornered us and told us [we] were perpetually less, we distrusted each other. We did not trust our fathers to raise us, to provide for us. Because we trusted nothing, we endeavored to protect ourselves, boys becoming misogynistic and violent, girls turning duplicitous, all of us hopeless. Some of us turned sour from the pressure, let it erode our sense of self until we hated what we saw, without and within.
I found the adage about time healing all wounds to be false: grief doesn't fade. Grief scabs over like my scars and pulls into new, painful configurations as it knits. It hurts in new ways. We are never free from grief. We are never free from the feeling that we have failed. We are never free from self-loathing. We are never free from the feeling that something is wrong with us, not with the world that made this mess.
I wake up every morning hoping to have dreamed of my brother. I carry the weight of grief even as I struggle to live. I understand what it feels like to be under siege. ... But this grief, for all its awful weight, insists that he matters.
This tradition of men leaving their families here seems systemic, fostered by endemic poverty. Sometimes color seems an accidental factor, but then it doesn't, especially when one thinks of the forced fracturing of families that the earliest African Americans endured under the yoke of slavery.
What I did not understand then was that the same pressures were weighing on us all. My entire community suffered from a lack of trust: we didn't trust society to provide the basics of a good education, safety, access to good jobs, fairness in the justice system. And even as we distrusted the society around us, the culture that cornered us and told us [we] were perpetually less, we distrusted each other. We did not trust our fathers to raise us, to provide for us. Because we trusted nothing, we endeavored to protect ourselves, boys becoming misogynistic and violent, girls turning duplicitous, all of us hopeless. Some of us turned sour from the pressure, let it erode our sense of self until we hated what we saw, without and within.
I found the adage about time healing all wounds to be false: grief doesn't fade. Grief scabs over like my scars and pulls into new, painful configurations as it knits. It hurts in new ways. We are never free from grief. We are never free from the feeling that we have failed. We are never free from self-loathing. We are never free from the feeling that something is wrong with us, not with the world that made this mess.
I wake up every morning hoping to have dreamed of my brother. I carry the weight of grief even as I struggle to live. I understand what it feels like to be under siege. ... But this grief, for all its awful weight, insists that he matters.