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.
This is a rare and mesmerizing account, told with real literary force and heartbreaking honesty..
But until now, there has not been a first-person account from someone who came through this hell and survived.
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.
Ishmael Beah used to be one of them.
In the more than fifty conflicts going on worldwide, it is estimated that there are some 300,000 child soldiers.
Children have become soldiers of choice.
This is how wars are fought now: by children, hopped-up on drugs and wielding AK-47s.
Yes, sometime.
You should tell us about it sometime.
I smile a little.
Cool.
You mean, you saw people running around with guns and shooting each other? Yes, all the time.
Why did you leave Sierra Leone? Because there is a war.
My new friends have begun to suspect I haven\'t told them the full story of my life.
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.
In the #1 New York Times bestseller, A Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beah tells a riveting story: how at the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence.
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
