四年时间，作者的五位亲友接连意外离世，他们的死看似毫无关联，却因身份和地点交织在一起。这些黑人青年生活在美国南方深处，代际贫困笼罩着他们的生命。在对往事的追思中，作者展现了在南北战争结束超过一个半世纪后的今天，种族主义如何通过经济和教育差异深度体制化，困扰着一代又一代的黑人青年。怀乡的温情混杂生者的愧疚，作者最终回到故土，写下他们和自己的故事，让那些被冰冷的统计数字所遮蔽的鲜活面孔重新浮现。


　　杰丝米妮·瓦德（Jesmyn Ward，1977—），生于美国密西西比州，密西根大学创意写作硕士，现任杜兰大学创意写作教授。小说《拾骨》《唱吧！为安葬的魂灵》先后于2011年和2017年获美国国家图书奖，成为首位两度获此殊荣的女性作家。《我们收获的男人们》2013入围美国国家书评人协会奖，次年获芝加哥论坛报哈特兰奖，2019年入选《纽约时报》“50年来最好50部回忆录”。2018年，瓦德入选《时代》周刊百大影响人物。另著有小说Where the Line Bleeds（2008）和Let Us Descend（2023），以及文集The Fire This Time（2016）和Navigate Your Stars（2020）。

Over the course of four years, five of the author's friends and relatives die unexpectedly, their seemingly unrelated deaths intertwined by identity and place. These young black men live in the deep South, where intergenerational poverty looms large over their lives. Reflecting on the past, the author shows how, more than a century and a half after the end of the Civil War, racism is deeply institutionalized through economic and educational disparities, haunting generations of black youth. The warmth of nostalgia mixes with the guilt of the living, and the author eventually returns to his native land to write about them and his own stories, allowing the fresh faces that have been obscured by cold statistics to resurface.

Jesmyn Ward (1977 -), born in Mississippi, USA, holds a Master's degree in creative writing from the University of Michigan and is currently a professor of creative writing at Tulane University. The novel "Picking Up Bones" and "Sing! For the Buried Souls" won the National Book Award in 2011 and 2017, becoming the first female author to win the award twice. The Men We Harvested was a finalist for the National Society of Book Reviewers Award in 2013, won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Award the following year, and was included in the New York Times' "50 Best Memoirs of 50 Years" in 2019. In 2018, Wade was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential People. He is also the author of The novels Where the Line Bleeds (2008) and Let Us Descend (2023), and the anthologies The Fire This Time (2016) and Navigate Your Stars (2020).