A Long Way Gone
Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
by Ishmael Beah

Description:

"My high school friends in New York City have begun to susspect I haven't told them the full story of my life."
"Why did you leave Sierra Leone?"
"Because there is a war."
"Did you witness some of the fighting?"
"Everyone in the coutnry did"
"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, traumatized, hopped-up on drugs, and wielding AK-47s. Children have become the soldiers of choice. In the more than fifty violent conflicts going on worldwide, it is estimated  that there are some 300,000 child soldiers. Ishmael Beah used to be one of them.

What does war look 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 it is rare to find a first-person account from someone who endured this hell and survived.

In A Long Way Gone:  Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, Ishmael Beah, now twenty-six years old, tells a powerfully gripping story:  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. At sixteen, he was removed from fighting by UNICEF, and through the help of the staff at his rehabilitation center, he learned to forgive himself, to regain his humanity, and, finally, to heal.

This is an extraordinary and mesmerizing account, told with real literary force and heartbreaking honesty.

Ismael Beah was born in Sierra Leone in 1980. He moved to the United States in 1998 and finished his last two years of high school at the United Nations International School in New York. He graduated from Oberlin College in 2004. He is a member of the Human Rights Watch Children's Rights Division Advisory Committee and has spoken before the Council on Foreign Relations, the Center for Emerging Threats and Opportunities (CETO) at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory, and many other NGO panels on children affected by war. He has also spoken before the United Nations on several occasions. His work has appeared in VerspertinePress and LIT magazine. He lives in New York City.

A Long Way Gone
Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
by Ishmael Beah

ISBN: 9780374105235
ISBN-10: 0374105235
Publisher: : Sarah Crichton Books (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Publication Date: 2007
Format: Hardcover, 240 pages
Book Type: New