We Were Brothers

Starred review from June 15, 2015
This boyhood memoir reveals much more than it ever explicitly states, with its tight focus on boyhood, brotherhood, estrangement, and reconciliation. An art professor and National Book Award-winning illustrator (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 2011), Moser writes that his older brother, Tommy, was actually the better artist of the two. He was also more troubled, though when Tommy gets the climactic chance to speak (or write) in his own words, a different perspective emerges. "Most of my memories of that time have the visual qualities of dreams: the images are slightly out of focus and dissolve at the edge," writes the author. "The palette is muted and nearly void of color." With a prose style that is precise, understated, and that rarely veers toward sentimentality, Moser describes coming of age in Chattanooga in an era permeated by racism and where any sign of oddness or weakness encouraged bullying. Both boys carried a "chip of inferiority"-the author was fat, dyslexic, and not athletic; his brother had developmental problems that kept him behind in school. With his brother as instigator (in the author's memory), they fought so hard that the police once were summoned. Tommy dropped out of military school, remained an apparently unrepentant racist, and enjoyed more of a successful life than one might have expected. The author rejected the racism of his upbringing, studied theology, and became a preacher before he found renown as an artist (his illustrations highlight the chapters). Yet the narrative isn't simply that black and white-their mother's best, lifelong friend was black, and both boys enjoyed playing with a black friend-and a climactic exchange of letters suggests how deeply each brother had misjudged the other through their extended estrangement of adulthood. Before Tommy's death, they enjoyed eight years of a brotherhood they had never known before, and the author describes the book as "an homage to him as well as a history of our burdened brotherhood." With masterful narrative control, Moser reveals the narrowness of perspective as well as the limitations of memory.

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October 1, 2015
National Book Award winner Moser's finely detailed, emotionally nuanced illustrations have graced the pages of many classics as well as his own books, including One Hundred Portraits (2010). He now adds precise and cutting prose to his creative repertoire in this valiantly forthright, superbly illustrated family memoir. In both riveting language and breathtaking drawings, at once acutely realistic and powerfully expressive, Moser confronts and explicates painful memories and regrets as he tells with profound retrospective insight the story of his Jim Crow-era, Chattanooga, Tennessee, boyhood. He was the younger of two brothers of radically opposed temperaments who clashed incessantly and violently; two white boys raised to be macho and racist, in spite of adoring their mother's African American best friend. Moser, who long ago repudiated this heritage, describes watching a Ku Klux Klan convoy passing their house and the day his enraged brother beat him bloody for sitting with two black women on a crowded bus. By crisply and frankly chronicling his battles and eventual reconciliation with his brother, Moser looks to a more caring and just future world.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)