Product Description

An international bestseller, named a Globe & Mail Best 100 Books of the Year, a New York Times Book Review 100 Notable Books of the Year, and a Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year.

It is estimated that in the more than fifty violent conflicts going on worldwide, there are some 300,000 child soldiers. Ishmael Beah used to be one of them.

In his riveting memoir, A Long Way Gone, Beah, now in his mid-twenties, tells how, at the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels in his homeland of Sierra Leone 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #56273 in Books
• Published on: 2007-02-13
• Binding: Hardcover
• 240 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. This absorbing account by a young man who, as a boy of 12, gets swept up in Sierra Leone's civil war goes beyond even the best journalistic efforts in revealing the life and mind of a child abducted into the horrors of warfare. Beah's harrowing journey transforms him overnight from a child enthralled by American hip-hop music and dance to an internal refugee bereft of family, wandering from village to village in a country grown deeply divided by the indiscriminate atrocities of unruly, sociopathic rebel and army forces. Beah then finds himself in the army—in a drug-filled life of casual mass slaughter that lasts until he is 15, when he's brought to a rehabilitation center sponsored by UNICEF and partnering NGOs. The process marks out Beah as a gifted spokesman for the center's work after his "repatriation" to civilian life in the capital, where he lives with his family and a distant uncle. When the war finally engulfs the capital, it sends 17-year-old Beah fleeing again, this time to the U.S., where he now lives. (Beah graduated from Oberlin College in 2004.) Told in clear, accessible language by a young writer with a gifted literary voice, this memoir seems destined to become a classic firsthand account of war and the ongoing plight of child soldiers in conflicts worldwide. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School—This gripping story by a children's-rights advocate recounts his experiences as a boy growing up in Sierra Leone in the 1990s, during one of the most brutal and violent civil wars in recent history. Beah, a boy equally thrilled by causing mischief as by memorizing passages from Shakespeare and dance moves from hip-hop videos, was a typical precocious 12-year-old. But rebel forces destroyed his childhood innocence when they hit his village, driving him to leave his home and travel the arid deserts and jungles of Africa. After several months of struggle, he was recruited by the national army, made a full soldier and learned to shoot an AK-47, and hated everyone who came up against the rebels. The first two thirds of his memoir are frightening: how easy it is for a normal boy to transform into someone as addicted to killing as he is to the cocaine that the army makes readily available. But an abrupt change occurred a few years later when agents from the United Nations pulled him out of the army and placed him in a rehabilitation center. Anger and hate slowly faded away, and readers see the first glimmers of Beah's work as an advocate. Told in a conversational, accessible style, this powerful record of war ends as a beacon to all teens experiencing violence around them by showing them that there are other ways to survive than by adding to the chaos.—Matthew L. Moffett, Pohick Regional Library, Burke, VA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
"Forget about blood diamond and any other Hollywood depiction of child soldiers in Africa. Ishmael Beah is the real thing. In clear-eyed prose, the young man from Sierra Leone tells a powerful story of murder and redemption...This is an important books." (Now Magazine 20070201)

"This absorbing account by a young man who, as a boy of 12, gets swept up in Sierra Leone's civil war goes beyond even the best journalistic efforts in revealing the life and mind of a child abducted into the horrors of warfare." (Publishers' Weekly 20070319)

"A Long Way Gone is a wrenching, beautiful, and mesmerizing tale. Beah's amazing saga provides a haunting lesson about how gentle folks can be capable of great brutalities as well as goodness and courage. It will leave you breathless." (Walter Isaacson The Hill Times 20170330)

"Beah tells his story with a direct honesty that is compelling to read and shocking to absorb. He takes you into the hell of war and with simple language describes the soul-numbing events that take a sensitive young boy and turn him into a killer." (Terry Peters North Shore News 20070408)

"[A Long Way Gone] is impossible to put down. Action spills over the pages...this slim volume bursts with pain after pain, battle after battle and fear that is palpable." (Goody Niosi Times-Colonist 20070524)

"Beah's book is the first true-life account of a child combatant to be published, and in it he engages with the nature of childhood, the fragility of moral values and the yearning for home. From the outset we are in a world utterly different to the glib accounts of the same war produced by western journalists whose interest in the child soldiers rarely surpasses purient fascination." (Aminatta Forna London Telegraph 20070401)

"If you think you have a good understanding of war, violence, or non-Western cultures, pick up this book and you'll realise you probably don't. Open your eyes to A Long Way Gone and see what another part of the world is like and witness how resilient human beings can be." (Amanda Davis The Mind's Eye 20070510)

Beah has a great eye for detail, and with it he creates passages that are often hauntingly beautiful. The book's strongest feature is its quest to show what happens to a young mind when it's pushed beyond the limits of comprehension. A Long Way Gone is a must-read for all of us who were allowed to blissfully liveout our childhoods, because Beah's book will help to ensure that others have the same privilege. (Brad Hooton Hour.ca 20070424)

"A Long Way Gone is a gritty, beautifully written book about the civil war in Sierra Leone and the children who were forced to fight it." (Willa McLean The Record 20070412)

A Long Way Gone isn't just Beah's engrossing account of child soldiering, it's also about the nightmarish transition form one life to another, from child to adult, from schooling to killing, and back again. His experience is a testament to the monumental rehabilitation process that awaits half a million child soldiers. (Matt Harrison Ottawa XPress 20070330)

...a riveting and dispiriting account of the civil awr in Sierra Leone. This war memoir hausts the heart long after the eyes have finished the final page. (John Marshall Seattle Post-Intelligencer 20070325)

"Beah's terrifying and heartbreaking story gives us the perspective of both victim and cold-blooded killer. It's a rare book indeed." (James MacGowan The Ottawa Citizen 20070309)

"A Long Way Gone...is an important story, one about war and children that is told unflinchingly." (Andrew Armitage Owen Sound Sun Times 20070320)

"You will never forget Ishmeal Beah...In A Long Way Gone Beah...tells a riviting story. It is, at last, a story of redemption and hope." (AllAfrica.com 20070312)

A clear, to the point memoir whose brevity velies its profound implications about who we are and what each of us is capable of. (AskMen.com 20070309)

"Raw and honest, A Long Way Gone is an important account of the ravages of war, and it is most disturbing as a reminder how easy it would be for any of us to break, to become unrecognizable in such extreme conditions." (Connie Ogle PopMatters.com 20070312)

"Beah tells a personal story that is, sadly, universal, except for the unusual ending that lets us share his story. Anyone who reads A Long Way Gone will be changed by this memoir." (Lynn Bonney Emporia Gazette 20070304)

"Beah remains the most articulate voice ever for children lost to the insanity of war." (Doug Barber The Sun Herald 20070223)

"Everyone in the world should read this book... We should read it to learn about the world and about what it means to be human...A Long Way Gone says something about human nature that we try, most of the time, to ignore." (Carolyn See Washington Post 20070221)

"Tough to put down and tougher to forget, A Long Way Gone is one of those books you read that dominates you, and changes your way of thinking." (Ryan O'Connell The Hawk 20070219)

"A Long Way Gone isn't a work of introspection or even of reflection: Events are recounted, unembellished, in real time -- which lends the book immediacy and momentum. The author trusts readers to supply their own emotions." (Bill Eichenberger Columbus Dispatch 20070216)

"A Long Way Gone is a clear-eyed, undeniably compelling look at wartime violence -- whose viciousness becomes profoundly disturbing when one realizes it's been committed by boys barely in their teens...Yet Gone finds its power in the revelation that under the right circumstances, people of any age can find themselved doing the most unthinkable things." (Gilbert Cruz Entertainment Weekly 20070211)

"It would have been enought if Ishmael Beah had merely survived the horrors described in A Long Way Gone. That he has written this unforgettable firsthand account of his odyssey is harder still to grasp. Those seeking to understand the human consequences of war, its brutal and brutalizing costs, would be wise to reflect on Ishmael Beah's story." (Chuck Leddy Philidelphia Inquirer 20070202)

"Beah has produced a book of such self-effacing humanity that refugees, political fronts and even death squads resolve themselves back into the faces of mothes, fathers and siblings. A Long Way Gone transports us into the lives of thousands of children whose lives have been altered by war, and it does so witha a genuine and disarmigly emotional force." (Richard Thompson Minneapolis Star Tribune 20071105)

"This absorbing account by a young man who, as a boy of 12, gets swept up in Sierra Leone's civil war surpasses the best journalistic efforts in revealing the life and mind of a child abducted into the horrors of warfare." (Publishers Weekly 20070225)

"The great benefit of Ishmael Beah's memoir, A Long Way Gone, is that it may help us arrive at an understanding of this situation...Beah's memoir joins an elite class of writing: Africans witnessing African wars...[it] makes you wonder how anyone comes through such unrelenting ghastliness and horror with his humanity and sanity intact. Unusually, the smiling, open face of the author on the book jacket provides welcome and timely reassurance. Ishmael Beah seems to prove it can happen." (New York Times 20070303)

"Ishmael is a powerful storyteller, moving fluidly between past and present, weaving folk tales and early childhood memories into his main narrative...Ishmael's story shows both the horror and the possibility of redemption. This is an unbearable book that has to be borne. Read it." (Globe & Mail 20070510)

"Beah morphed from a poor village boy to grim reaper to UNICEF ambassador to best-selling author in little more than a decade. His life proves that, with hope, anything is possible. This is the message we are hungry to hear. And when Beah delivers it, we believe him." (New York Press 20070303)

"A Long Way Gone is by no means an easy read. It's the sort of book from which many readers will, rightly, cringe. It's the sort of book that will give you nightmares. It is, however, the sort of book that must be read. It's an essential step toward understanding -- and perhaps, just perhaps, coming to change the world around us. One can hope." (Vancouver Sun 20070402)

"This powerful record of war ends as a beacon to all teens experiencing violence around them by showing them that there are other ways to survive than by adding to the chaos." (School Library Journal 20070330)

"When asked why people are interested in his story, [Beah's] modest response reflects the beginning of his book: 'When people hear about the war it's so distant they can't see the humanity of the people that it affects. I'm putting a human face to it so people can realize it's not so distant. They read it and they think: this could be my son, this could be my brother. This could be me." (Nanaimo Daily News 20070327)

"Beah's heartbreaking honesty and incredible insight combine to provide a powerful memoir and message." (War Child Canada )