Community Reading Project

(2008-2009) A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

-A synopsis of the book from its jacket:

My high school friends in New York City have begun to suspect I haven't told them the full story of my life.
     "Why did you leave Sierra Leone?"
     "Because there was a war."
     "Did you witness some of the fighting?"
     "Everyone in the country 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 them 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. Ishmeal 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 stories 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, Ishmeal Beah, now twenty-six years old, tells a powerfully gripping story: At age 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 how 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.

Page last modified August 19, 2009