A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah
This book cut deep, very few books make me want to cry, throw things and feel disgusted all at once. You can’t help but feel sorry for the author, he lost everything, his family, friends, home… you can’t help but cry at the images of these people being killed, the descriptions of what went on in his area of the country. And you can’t help but be angry at the author when he describes killing someone, almost gleefully – yet… you have to remind yourself that he was 12. He was really given no real choice other than death for himself. This story pulled me in and in the end, I felt sad for him now, he’s still only 25 or so, the horror he must relive… I just cannot imagine.
I hope there is a second memoir. I was disappointed that we didn’t find out how he got out of Guinea to the United States and how he got through the next 6 years of his life.
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From the Publisher
My new friends have begun to suspect I haven’t told them the full story of my life.
“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.”
This is how wars are fought now: by children, hopped-up on drugs and wielding AK-47s. Children have become soldiers of choice. In the more than fifty conflicts going on worldwide, it is estimated that there are some 300,000 child soldiers. Ishmael Beah used to be one of them.
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. This is a rare and mesmerizing account, told with real literary force and heartbreaking honesty.
