Moving, powerful, beautiful

books:


	• A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier Ishmael Beah Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007 - 240 pages average customer review:based on 377 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Wonderful..

I loved this book from beginning to end. Its tough to take in..but very worthwhile.

A heartbreaking story but definitely recommended.

very interesting story

This book was very interesting and I could not put it down. It is no fantastically written piece of literature, but the story draws you in and will not let you go.

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Gripping Novel

A Long Way Gone, a Sarah Crichton Book published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is a gut wrenching memoir of a child soldier, caught in the violence of Sierra Leone's civil war in 1992. Author Ishmael Beah's personal experiences in this conflict, coupled with his ability to tell his story with great insight and emotion, will capture most readers from the very first paragraph.

Even the book's title has interesting multiple meanings. The child Ishmael is a long way gone from home and all that is familiar; a long way gone from normal civilized behavior as part of the drug and violence induced madness of army life and a long way gone from where he ended as a soldier and penned this book.

Stripped of his family, home and friends by the ever encroaching war, Ishmael struggles to escape and survive the war that eventually draws him into its web spun with threads of fear, violence, death, and destruction. Once trapped, he embraces the insanity of drugs and the unchecked cruelty that stokes the war's fires.

The book is not a detailed chronology, but a dramatic and perceptive retrospective of events through the lens of a child, explaining how that child can be transformed into a blood thirsty soldier intent on killing for killing's sake. Beah is able to weave touching moments and memories throughout the violence that both help and hinder Ishmael's ability to withstand the mental anguish that war inflicts.
Beah relates the dramatically harrowing story of being swept up into the raging civil war with raw emotion, but in an emotionally detached style that evokes the psychological detachment needed to be a child, especially a child soldier, able to survive the experience. Proving himself to be a masterful storyteller, Beah`s book is filled with tales, fables, adventures, insights and dialogue both frightening and tender.

The author's ability to look back at his life reflectively with an understanding sadness of what he was forced to do in order to live and survive makes this book a compelling read. Beah takes great care in painting the picture of innocence lost, day by day and piece by piece to the death, devastation and terror of war. He states, "These days I live in three worlds: my dreams, and the experiences of my new life, which trigger memories from the past."

Beah is able to convey that the love of family, the value of friendship and the resilience of human spirit can transcend and survive the unimaginable chaos and fear that war brings in its wake. However, he takes great care to demonstrate that chance plays a large role in determining who and what survives.

This book is highly recommended reading, even for the younger reader, as the story possesses some great lessons of value. Although some might feel that this book is too bloody, vivid and real for the younger reader, those twelve and older should be able to handle the material. At least they aren't facing the dilemma that young boys of twelve faced in Sierra Leone in the Nineteen-Nineties: to run for your life, to fight to stay alive or to die simply because you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

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Moving, powerful, beautiful

Everyone needs to read this book. Beah speaks with an honesty that is rarely seen and a conversational manner that takes readers into his world. I am an English teacher and I would like every single student to read this book.

Remarkable

Ishmael Beah makes no plea for forgiveness nor does he beg a place in this world. Yet this memoir earns him both. The horrible atrocities that Beah was both victim and perpetrator of are described with a sort of detached sensitivity that makes this readable to those of us living outside of the tragic, war torn reality that was Beah's. I applaud Beah's redemptive work as I wish him peace and happiness for the remainder of his time here.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

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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