A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

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.

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.

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

This is an excellent bio. I look forward to the rest of the story.

Ishmael Beah's story about a boy who fled his village, was on the run for several months, and then ended up as a boy soldier for more than two years before being rescued by UNICEF workers is too incredible to be real... which is exactly why I didn't buy it at all when I read it.

I realize there are child soldiers out there in war torn developing countries. It's tragic, and it's also a good thing that someone shed light on the situation. However, A Long Way Gone reads less like a memoir, and more like a Hollywood movie. Everything in the book happens as though it were written on a script. He barely missed reuniting with his entire family because he got to their new village just moments after rebels attacked. He just happened to overhear their conversation about "it was a good attack because no one survived. We got them all!" As someone else mentioned, the cassettes in his pockets just happened to fall out of his pocket, miraculously, in the nick of time to save his life... TWICE. He was nearly stabbed by a rebel boy, but his friend stabbed the boy in the back... just in the nick of time, again.

The book is also bursting with inaccuracies and contradictions. Ishmael claims his was forced to flee his village in 1993. Because of my initial distrust of the details in his memoir, I decided to google the book. I had no idea so many people had done extensive investigations into the claims he makes in his story. Apparently, Ishmeal is the only person from his village that seems to think the attacks in his village happened in 1993. Everyone else there knows they started in 1995. They've even backed this up with school documents showing that he was in school, when Ishmael claims he was on his own running for his life. This means that if he was in the army, at most it could have only been for a few months (which is still more than any 15 year old boy should have to deal with). Also, despite the fact that several UNICEF workers at that time in Sierra Leon were interviewed and had said that an uprising at one of their camps, which resulted in six killed, would have been a major ordeal in the country, not a single one of them can recall that ever happening.

The contradictions I mentioned could simply be the result of bad editing. This is one of the worst edited books I've ever read. As Ishmael is not a native English speaker, the blame for that should be his editor's. For example, in one chapter he talks about a town where him and his friends (the second group he encounters before he's taken into the army) were captured and taken before a village chief who would decide whether they lived or died. In the very next village, the same thing happened (this is where his cassettes saves him for the second time). He then remarked on how this had happened to him a lot. He wondered whether or not it was the first time for his other friends. Except, he JUST SAID IT DID! Ugh!

In addition to all this fun stuff, there are all kinds of typos. Like I said, this book is so poorly edited, the editors should rethink their career path. Things such as "reasons" being printed where it's obvious the word meant was "seasons". It was something obvious like "the change of reasons". Then there's also redundancies all over the place. Stuff similar to "I'm going to America to speak at a conference in New York in America. It's a conference for child humanitarian issues in America." You would think the editor would weed these things out to improve the flow.

Despite all this, non-fiction or fiction, I still think it's an interesting story and an important one to tell. If the editing was better, it would have been so painful to read, but it did hold my interest mostly. I wish it was billed as "based on true events" or something like that. Instead the author claims it is 100% factual... which it is not.

A Long Way Gone: Memoir of a Boy Solider is a book that exposes the horrors of war from a child's perspective. Yet, unlike the account of an observer, this power book is the story of a boy who fought in the Sierra Leon Civil War. As a reader, it is impossible to be emotionally callous when immersing oneself in this book's pages, since its author presents a picturesque, emotive, and humane narration of his three years as a boy solider.

Beah's writing style makes it difficult for the reader to put-down this book once it has been picked-up. The language is simple yet descriptive and informative. Likewise, the author's timeline layout of the book provides a realistic approach to the telling of his story, since all chapters are rationally connected.

There are many times in the book that I was moved to tears by the heinous actions that Ishmael had to endure as a boy solider. Whether it was the death of his family, seeing his friends die in the frontline, or having to drug himself to make sense of his world, I was able to empathize with Beah's feelings of frustration, confusion, despondency, and fear.

I strongly recommend this book to everybody. As a work which speaks of the draconian reality of war -a human invention-, I feel there is no person who will not benefit from reading it. This book will make the reader reflect on his/her own life, and how tragedy, perseverance, and faith -non/religious- can drastically change ones life.