63 pages • 2 hours read
Wes MooreThe Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2010A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Epilogue Summary
This brief section highlights the details that further separate the realities of the two Wes Moores. Since 2000, the other Wes Moore “has spent every day of his life […] in the Jessup Correctional Institution, a maximum-security facility in Maryland” (173). At the time Moore was writing the book, Wes was a carpenter and made about 53 cents a day. He was also a devout Muslim. Ten years into his life sentence, he was 33 years old and had just become a grandfather.
After becoming a Rhodes Scholar, Moore spent two and a half years earning a master’s degree in international relations at Oxford University. Following this, he interned in Washington, DC, focusing on homeland security. After being advised to look into economics, Moore “joined the world of high finance on Wall Street” (176).
He took a leave of absence and then served for several months in Afghanistan. Upon returning to US soil, he became an assistant to Condoleezza Rice. Moore describes the special experiences he has had in some of the most honorable places in the world. He ends this section by answering the questions he commonly hears during speaking engagements. Namely, people want to know what made the difference between the two Wes Moores. He admits that he doesn’t know:
As I’ve puzzled over the issue, I’ve become convinced that there are some clear and powerful measures that can be taken during this crucial time in a young person’s life. Some of the ones that helped me come to mind, from finding strong mentors to being entrusted with responsibilities that forced me to get serious about my behavior. There is no one thing that leads people to move in one direction or another (179).
Epilogue Analysis
The question that initiated Moore’s decision to research and write this book turns out to be one he can’t answer. As early as the Introduction, Moore notes that this is the “chilling truth” of their stories: “[Wes’s] story could have been mine. The tragedy is that my story could have been his” (xi). He reiterates here that “very few lives hinge on any single moment or decision or circumstance” (182). However, he does identify one such moment in his own story, again crediting Colin Powell’s My American Journey with making a big difference in his life:
By establishing himself as the protagonist of his own story, he inspired me and countless other young people to see ourselves as capable of taking control of our own destinies, and to realize how each decision we make determines the course of our life stories (182).
The key advantage that Moore believes he had over the other Wes Moore was that he was “surrounded by people […] who kept pushing [him] to see more than what was directly in front of [him], to see the boundless possibilities of the wider world and the unexplored possibilities within [himself]” (179). The other Wes Moore had a “limited world” where he followed “the only models available” (179). He had no one to really inspire him to do anything different than what he saw in his neighborhood. However, like the author, Wes did have a few opportunities where his life could have turned on a dime and gone in a completely different direction, but his thinking didn’t really take him that far.
