A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
Written by Ishmael Beah
Narrated by Ishmael Beah
4/5
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About this audiobook
This is how wars are fought now by children, hopped up on drugs, and wielding AK-47s. In the more than fifty violent conflicts going on worldwide, it is estimated that there are some 300,000 child soldiers.
Ishmael Beah used to be one of them. 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 it is rare to find a first-person account from someone who endured this hell and survived.
In A Long Way Gone Beah, now twenty-six years old, tells a riveting story in his own words: 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.
A Macmillan Audio production.
Ishmael Beah
Ishmael Beah, born in 1980 in Sierra Leone, West Africa, is the New York Times bestselling author of A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. The book has been published in over thirty languages and was nominated for a Quill Award in 2007. Time magazine named the book as one of the top ten nonfiction books of 2007, ranking it at number three. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Vespertine Press, LIT, Parabola, and numerous academic journals. He is a UNICEF Ambassador and Advocate for Children Affected by War; a member of the Human Rights Watch Children’s Rights Advisory Committee; an advisory board member at the Center for the Study of Youth and Political Violence at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville; visiting scholar at the Center for International Conflict Resolution at Columbia University; visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of Genocide, Conflict Resolution, and Human Rights at Rutgers University; cofounder of the Network of Young People Affected by War (NYPAW); and president of the Ishmael Beah Foundation. He has spoken before the United Nations, the Council on Foreign Relations, and many panels on the effects of war on children. He is a graduate of Oberlin College with a B.A. in Political Science and resides in Brooklyn, New York.
Reviews for A Long Way Gone
1,859 ratings192 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A difficult book to read, but very worthwhile.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Insight into the lives of boy soldiers in Sierra Leone during a civil war. The violence is unimaginable, yet this memoir shows the compassion and feelings of its author. Knowing he survived is the only thing that kept me reading as the harshness of war tormented Ishmael and those he met.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is another one of those books that is horrible to read but vitally important to understand. In particular, those of us privileged enough to live in safe countries where these sort of events seem like nightmares from another world and we are so concerned with our own safety that we would deny entry to folks fleeing atrocities of this nature.I have tremendous gratitude to Mr. Beah for sharing this deeply personal and intimate story.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5To be honest, I wasn't able to finish this book. I got about halfway through but the violence in it was too much to stomach. I feel so bad for what he went through, I can't even fathom it. What I did read was well written and I'm sure if I would have been able to finish it I would have given it four or five stars.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A very, very well-written book. Tis almost too well-written. I would say that the likelihood of the author getting help for the writing is pretty high, ut that does not detract from the book. Nor does the controversy by the muckraking Australian press. Beah's tale is an awful one and one worthy of reading by a wide audience. Well done, yet quite sad.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Very good.