While the author Wes Moore was preparing for his graduate studies at Oxford and having his story illuminated in the Baltimore Sun, the other Wes Moore was arrested for robbery alongside his brother and charged with murder; both brothers were likely to receive the death penalty. Because Moore couldn’t shake the story and feeling of connection with the other Wes Moore, he wrote a letter to him. The imprisoned Wes Moore wrote back, and so began their correspondence. While spending time with Wes, the author discovered that “[their] two stories together [helped him] to untangle some of the larger story of [their] generation of young men, boys who came of age during a historically chaotic and violent time and emerged to succeed and fail in unprecedented ways” (xiii). In the author’s own words, “this book is meant to show how, for those of us who live in the most precarious places in this country, our destinies can be determined by a single stumble down the wrong path, or a tentative step down the right one” (xiv).