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A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier By Ishmael Beah ( Farrar, Straus and Giroux )
Release Date: 2008-08-05
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Product Description
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.
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 Wow! Powerful.... ( alohomora1607 )
A Long Way Gone is a memoir of Ishmael Beah's days as a child soldier in Sierra Leone. Some reviewers have questioned the accuracy of the details...I read this book with an open mind, realizing that this book details the author's memories of the events he experienced as a child soldier. Beah is a good storyteller, and effectively illustrates the horrifying reality of living in a country where the government is so vulnerable to rebel forces. The details are vivid, and at times, very difficult to read. I cannot fathom how traumatic it must have been to see so many people killed, and to be one of the killers. This is Beah's story, and the fact of the matter is that what happened to Beah is going on in other countries today, and everyone needs to be aware of it. This book should be required reading in middle and/or high school. An incredible story.
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 a lot easier to take when you realize it's mostly FAKE ( glork )
I found this book to be quite harrowing: I frequently had to put it down and cool off, so troubling was the stuff I was reading.
But that was only up to about page 50 or so. After that it became a lot easier to stomach.
Why page 50? Because that's when I went to the internet and learned a little bit about the book's author, Ishmael Beah.
In short, Beah, while he apparently did undergo some rather unpleasant experiences in his native Sierra Leone, evidently did not undergo all the experiences related in "A Long Way Gone," or at least not directly. Many journalists have labeled this book a fraud.
If you'd like to find out about the controversy yourself, start with his Wikipedia page. Follow the links at the bottom.
Anyhow, some observations:
1. Beah has to be a world-class moron for not grasping that playing fast and loose with the truth in the age of the Internet is something that would later come back to haunt him. And don't tell me he was an untutored villager who had no way of understanding the implications of this: he was a student at Oberlin.
2. If Beah had simply pulled a Frederick Exley and said, "Hey, folks, this is a fictionalized autobiography. I'm not so much interested in the precise truth of events so much as the effect they had on my spirit and development." He would be untouchable.
3. This irony is certainly not deliberate, but you know how the central thrust of the book is that after an endless parade of horrors, you get inured? After pages and pages of blood, several limbs, and mutilated bodies, you pretty much stop caring. It's like you're an armchair boy soldier!
4. Beah should be despised, not "addressing the U.N." True, he may have "forgiven himself" in some feel-good workshop, but I for one haven't forgiven him. Look, if they gave him a Kalashnikov when he was 7 or 8 and bullied him into shooting up the town, that'd be one thing. But 15? That's old enough to know the difference between right and wrong in any culture. Murderer.
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 A Book Everyone Should Read!
Ishmael Beah has written an amazing memoir called A Long Way Gone, which tells the story of his life as a child soldier in Sierra Leone. This is a book that everyone should take the time to read, because it will really teach you a lot about the current problem worldwide, with young kids being drugged, traumatized, and allowed to wield guns and fight in wars.
Ishmael experienced all the events in this book firsthand, and his story is utterly captivating. He moved to the United States in 1998 and finished high school in New York at the United Nations International School. In 2004 he graduated Oberlin College, and has spoken in front of many major world organizations that help fight for the estimated 300,000 children being used to fight in wars around the world today.
Ishmael accomplished exactly what he wanted by writing this book- he informed hundreds of thousands of people about the horrible lives that child soldiers lead all around the world. People need to look into this problem and become informed about it so that they can help organizations like UNICEF prevent it. There are thousands of young children whose lives are being taken away from them, and they are being exposed to violence. This is something no child should ever have to go through.
This book has many strengths, including things like its plot, which will make it very hard to put the book down, and all the information it gives you about wars fought in Sierra Leone. I think the only weakness was the writing style- Ishmael should have been a little bit more descriptive in his writing, and used more descriptive words to give you a better visual picture in your head of what was going on. Over all, A Long Way Gone is an outstanding true story that will teach you about the lives of child soldiers.
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Good book.
I found this book to be very good. I would have enjoyed it more if I read it without so much time in between reading. I would highly recomment this book. It is filled with stories that will tear your heart apart and stories that will really make you appreciate your own life.
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Ishmael Beah
A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
This is an excellent bio. I look forward to the rest of the story.
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