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A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier | 
 enlarge | Author: Ishmael Beah
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Category: Book
List Price: $12.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  419 reviews
Sales Rank: 566
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1st
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 240
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.7
ISBN: 0374531269
Dewey Decimal Number: 966.404
EAN: 9780374531263
ASIN: 0374531269
Publication Date: August 5, 2008
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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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| Customer Reviews: Read 414 more reviews...
 a lot easier to take when you realize it's mostly FAKE November 14, 2008
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.
 A Book Everyone Should Read! November 13, 2008
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.
 Good book. November 6, 2008
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.
Ishmael Beah November 2, 2008
A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
This is an excellent bio. I look forward to the rest of the story.
Amazing story. Too bad I don't believe it. October 31, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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.
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