A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier / Ishmael Beah
Sierre Leone is a long way off – not only geographically, but worldly. When I think of this country, I am reminded of the African Diaspora, the prolonged civil war, and the invariable crimes against humanity. I have never met anyone from Sierre Leone, nor read anything beyond newspaper articles about this country in West Africa. Yet, Ishmael Beah, in A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, opens his world to us in a voice so compelling and childlike in its memory that this book is hard to put down.
At first Ishmael’s life is like any other boy’s growing up in a small African village. He plays with his brothers and friends, does chores at home, and goes to school, where his favorite thing to do is read Shakespeare. He and his friends run, dance, sing, and play soccer and hiding games. His childhood abruptly ends the day soldiers enter his village while he is in school and chase away and murder his family and the rest of the villagers.
Through the author’s eyes we experience the hunger and fear of living in hiding, traveling from one burned village to the next in a desperate attempt to find his family, and then being captured. In a calm voice, the author speaks of his fear and resignation at being conscripted into the army at the age of 9 years old, and the drug-induced state in which he is forced to kill.
If it weren’t for the brilliant smile of the author pictured on the back cover of this book, I am not sure I could have continued to read it to the end. Yet, this is an important war story of our day. Ishmael Beah has written a first-hand account of the ongoing, brutal experiences of boy soldiers all over the world.
–Hope Houston, Manager of Reference Services
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Read More
Read more about author Ishmael Beah by visiting the author’s website or take a look at other reviews in The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, and The Christian Science Monitor.