A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
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Recommended By
Lin Snow, Rebecca Adler, and Jerrett Taylor.
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Daniel Insley, snowchyld, Kathy Plant, siguy, Jim rutherford, Daniel 4214, and Missy.
Book Details
Written by Ishmael Beah.
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($22.00)
Editorial Review (from Amazon.com)
“Why did you leave Sierra Leone?”
“Because there is a war.”
“You mean, you saw people running around with guns and shooting each other?”
“Yes, all the time.”
“Cool.”
I smile a little.
“You should tell us about it sometime.”
“Yes, sometime.”
What is war like through the eyes of a child soldier? How does one become a killer? How does one stop? Child soldiers have been profiled by journalists, and novelists have struggled to imagine their lives. But until now, there has not been a first-person account from someone who came through this hell and survived.
In A Long Way Gone, Beah, now twenty-five years old, tells a riveting story: how at the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By thirteen, he’d been picked up by the government army, and Beah, at heart a gentle boy, found that he was capable of truly terrible acts.
User Reviews (2) Login or create an account to write a review.
Jerrett Taylor thinks this book is Excellent.
Ishmael tells the story of his life as a child soldier in Sierra Leone and in doing so does a good job of illustrating how normal life was before the civil war broke out, and how people changed as a result.
Ishmael is a natural storyteller, telling a very important story - This is one of those books that everyone should read.
Rebecca Adler thinks this book is Excellent.
Ishmael Beah grew up in Sierra Leone before and during the recent civil war that displaced and killed thousands of his countrymen. In addition to living through the war, Beah also had a role in it as a boy soldier. From the age of 13 he was recruited and trained to kill. He was rescued from his life in the military by UNICEF and only made it out of Sierra Leone because of his desire not to be re-recruited by the military when Freetown was attacked, only 8 months after his rescue from the military.
Beah is truly a remarkable story teller. It's not just that he has an amazing and difficult story to tell, but that he knows how to tell a story with vivid details to make the reader really understand what things were like. He skips a good portion of his time in the war, just saying "I had been in the military for two years when..." I was both glad and disappointed that he had left so much out. The killing and maiming in Sierra Leone was extremely gruesome and I was glad to have been spared having to read about it in more detail, however I felt like I missed out on a good portion of Beah's life and what he went through during those years. Did he ever doubt what he was doing? Did he ever think of trying to escape? Those kinds of things.
This was a courageous book to write and I strongly think other people should read it, especially if they've never heard of Sierra Leone and child soldiering.