Readalikes: If you enjoyed September's selection . . .

If you liked Men We Reaped: A Memoir by Jesmyn Ward, then you might also like these titles suggested by Ward's publisher, Bloomsbury Publishing: Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones and Where the Line Bleeds; Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying; Jamaica Kincaid, My Brother; Maya Angelou, Mom & Me & Mom and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings; Mitchell S. Jackson, The Residue Years; John Edgar Wideman, Brothers and Keepers; David Berg, Run, Brother, Run; Sonia Sotomayor, My Beloved World; Margaret Wrinkle, Wash; Toni Morrison, Home; Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi; Ayana Mathis, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie; Mary Williams, The Lost Daughter.

And our discussion group members recommend the book The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson and the film: Beasts of the Southern Wild directed by Benh Zeitlin and adapted by Zeitlin and Lucy Alibar from Alibar's one-act play Juicy and Delicious.

September Not Fiction Book Discussions

Men We Reaped: A Memoir by Jesmyn Ward explores the legacy of systemic racism in American culture. In just four years, Ward lost five young men among her family and friends to seemingly random and unrelated causes: her brother Joshua to a car accident, her friend Ronald to suicide, her cousin C. J. to another car accident, her friend Demond to murder, and her friend Roger to a drug overdose. In trying to come to terms with these great losses, Ward discovers a unifying condition--all were poor, Black, and male in the South. In writing her memoir, she says, "My hope is that . . . I'll understand a bit better why this epidemic happened, about how the history of racism and economic inequality and lapsed public and personal responsibility festered and turned sour and spread here."

The essence of what she comes to understand is society's devaluation of Blacks, and, most insidious of all, Blacks' devaluation of themselves: "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."

An interviewer for Vogue asked Ward how she would like to see her memoir received, and she replied, “Ideally, I’d like readers to see the young men and women I write about as human beings: complicated and alive and unique. And I hope that the experience of seeing my characters as real, of sympathizing with them, would change the reader so that the next time another young black man or woman is killed, someone will be held accountable. Perhaps, in addition to the person who commits the crime, even the culture that engenders the phenomena as well? But that’s the optimist in me. The pessimist simply wants readers to find something that speaks to them, that makes them feel, that takes them outside of their experience and makes them live another reality.” Ward's loving yet honest descriptions of her family, friends, and community revalue them, revealing the complex interworkings of societal and individual responsibility. We come to know these people, and as we do, their stories embody the statistics about race and poverty in a way we can no longer avoid feeling connected to in a deeply personal way. As author Robert Olen Butler says, "The tears we weep with Jesmyn Ward are for all of us, are about all of us."

How do Ward's complex narrative structure, setting, and characterization affect your feelings about the larger cultural and political issues she illustrates? How does Men We Reaped help you understand recent stories about race and violence in the news? We will consider these questions and more.

We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, September 2, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, September 18, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.