A Long Way Gone is the true story of Ishmael Beah, who becomes an unwilling boy soldier during a civil war in Sierra Leone. When he is twelve years old, Beah’s village is attacked while he is away performing in a rap group with friends. Among the confusion, violence, and uncertainty of the war, Ishmael, his brother, and his friends wander from village to village in search of food and shelter. Their day-to-day existence is a struggle of survival, and the boys find themselves committing acts they would never have believed themselves capable of, such as stealing food from children.
Eventually, Ishmael is conscripted as a soldier by the army and he becomes the very thing he feared: a killing machine capable of horrible violence. The army becomes his family and he is brainwashed into believing that each rebel death may avenge his own family’s slaughter. The boy soldiers become addicted to cocaine, marijuana, and “brown brown,” which give them the courage to fight and the ability to repress their emotions in times of war. Ishmael continues to soldier fiercely until his Lieutenant turns the boy soldiers over to UNICEF.
Ishmael is taken to a rehabilitation center, where he struggles to understand his past and to imagine a future. The love and compassion he finds at the center from a nurse named Esther opens up an understanding and forgiveness within himself. Ishmael is welcomed by his extended family in Freetown and is again saved by their support and kindness.
Ishmael is invited along with other children of war to New York City to tell his story to the United Nations. He learns that others like him have suffered and survived. He meets Laura Simms, a storyteller and his future foster mom, and sees the importance of sharing his experience with the world in hopes of preventing such horrors from happening to other children.
After Ishmael returns to Freetown, Sierra Leone, a coup by the RUF and the military ousts the civilian government, and the war Ishmael has been avoiding catches up with him. After his uncle’s death, Ishmael flees Sierra Leone for neighboring Guinea and eventually makes his way to his new life in the United States.
About the Author
Ishmael Beah is a Sierra Leonean author and human rights activist who rose to fame with his personal history, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Solider. Beah was born on November 23, 1980, in Mattru Jong, Bonthe District, Sierra Leone, in West Africa. The Sierra Leone Civil War started in March 1991 when Beah was ten years old. When he was twelve, the war affected him directly. Rebel forces attacked his home village of Mogbwemo, killing his parents.
Beah wandered as a refugee from place to place for nearly a year, both alone and with a small group of boys who included his older brother. Shortly after his brother was killed, Beah was recruited as a child soldier in the Sierra Leonean government army when he was just thirteen years old. Beah took part in numerous battles with the army, but in early 1996, at the age of fifteen, he was rescued from the military by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and placed in a rehabilitation home in Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital city. He spent eight months in the home before being sent to live with his uncle. In November 1996, he travelled to New York City to take part in the United Nation’s First International Children’s Parliament, a conference that addressed the devastating impact of war on children in various nations around the world.
In 1997 with the help of UNICEF, Beah left Sierra Leone and arrived in New York City, New York, where he lived with Laura Simms, his foster mother. Beah, now seventeen, attended high school at the United Nations International School. After graduating, Beah enrolled Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, graduating in 2004 with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science. He also won Oberlin’s Dainne Vruels Fiction Prize for his Story at Noon.
While at Oberlin, Beah was an advocate for the rights of children caught up in war. In 2006 he gave a speech at the Religious for Peace Youth Assembly, titled “Religious Youth for Peace: Confronting Violence and Advancing Shared Security” in Tokyo, Japan. In 2007 Beah published A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of A Boy Soldier, which told his story as a child soldier in the Sierra Leone Civil War. The book became a bestseller and was nominated for a Quill Award in the Best Debut Author category for 2007. Time magazine named it one of the Top Nonfiction Books of 2007.
The controversy came as critics challenged the accuracy of some events, and the chronology has been called into question, particularly the claim that Beah became a child soldier in 1993 rather than 1995. Beah defended his account of the events, and in 2009, for the first time in twelve years, he returned to Sierra Leone, a homecoming which he described as bittersweet. In 2014 Beah published Radiance of Tomorrow: A Novel, his first attempt at fiction writing.
Other Books by the Author
Little Family: A Novel
Radiance of Tomorrow
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.