A Long Way Gone
by Ishmael Beah
What war does to a child, from the inside.
For you if
you want to understand child soldiers not as a statistic but as specific human beings with a before and an after
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Beah was twelve when the Sierra Leone civil war reached his village. By thirteen he was a soldier. This memoir reconstructs what happened to him — the violence he witnessed, the violence he committed, the rehabilitation that followed — with a directness that makes it almost unbearable to read. He wrote it because the world talked about child soldiers without ever hearing from one. The most important dispatch from inside a category of human experience that journalism can describe but only a survivor can actually convey.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Sierra Leone • West Africa
- Voice
- Written by a Sierra Leonean author
- Topics
- sierra leone civil war
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