A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

this book was extremely enlightening and disturbing...very hard to believe this is STILL going on!

This is not a book for the faint of heart. It's descriptions at times are so graphic, so realistic, it is if you are their beside the characters enduring the fate that awaits. It is very well written.
I easily became engrossed and didn't want to put it down, although i was honestly disappointed with the ending, finishing all too soon with not enough information to satisfy.
I have no trouble recommending this book to others, knowing they will take something away from the heart moving read. Matter of fact i have brought copies already and have given them as gifts, with one friend saying it was awesome, and is up their as one of the best books he has read.
Don't pass it up, READ NOW!! and i can only hope you will be motivated to want more for the youth of the world.

I found the book to be very interesting and revealing of what young boys who are forced to kill others must do to survive. I had never realized what they go through and the rehabilitation they need to cope with their feelings afterward. To lose their parents first and then experience the need to run for their lives gives us as free citizens the appreciation of the freedoms we enjoy.

Fair warning, this story will make you shiver. Emerging from the pages like an inverted Mark Twain novel, it reveals the tale of a young boy named Ishmael Beah and his horrific journey through early adolescence in war ravaged Sierra Leone in the 1990s. It's not the high octane carnage, sadistic ingenuity, or pervasive sense of evil that render this book more terrifying than a Stephen King/Dean Koontz collaboration. It's the fact that it's real, the candid recollections of an innocent kid caught in the vise of hell and abandoned there. This, the narrative illustrates with chilling authenticity, is how demons are made.

Beah's transformation from a hip hop loving twelve year old with low slung pants into brutal, bloodthirsty automaton takes place in stages, after his village is attacked and brutalized by rebel forces battling Sierra's Leone's military government. Stripped of his family, his possessions, and through hunger, terror, and exhaustion, of all hope for escape, Beah strips himself down to an essential survivalist core. In the process, the most basic empathies that define a human being peel away, and the stark dictum of kill or be killed becomes the only rule that matters.

Co opted by the guerilla forces ravaging the countryside, Beah and his young friends become soldiers, outdoing each other in acts of violence the way most twelve year olds compete at baseball. Fueled by drugs and the adrenaline of survival, they bond with their overseers with the fervor of a championship high school football team. Their banter with each other becomes ever more obscene, still peppered as it is with the playful ripostes of youthful rivalry. But though the narrative style of simple declarative sentences and innocent exclamations remains consistent throughout, we observe changes in these children that makes us fear them, even at the remove of ink on page. They become monsters.

Only once removed from the situation by a UN sponsored NGO does the depth of the damage done to these young souls reveal itself in unvarnished form. Contemptuous of humanity, seriously addicted now to amphetamines and to their commanders' approval, they're dangerous to each other and anyone who comes in contact with them, including their naive rescuers. Months pass before even the most rudimentary chinks can be observed in their armor of callous cruelty. In time, change happens. But we have no way of knowing how deep the scars will go.

One of the most frightening aspects of this book, aside from its unflinching authenticity, is that fact that there are no good guys. The conflicts destroying Sierra Leone are like a jumbled chess set of all one color, with no sense at all of who carries the banner of morality, or even simple humanity. One hopes that Ishmael Beah has banished the last of his nightmares with the publication of his book. But it's more likely that he's just passed them all along to us, and that the monsters live on.

The power of the human being to survive even the harshest of environments! This book talks about how kindness can bring us back from the brink of hell. An amazing story. I wish it was not true.