Ishmael Beah - A Long Way Gone

“Mr. Beah, now 26, speaks in a distinctive voice, and he tells an important story. Hundreds of thousands of child soldiers fight in dozens of nasty conflicts in Africa and elsewhere, and while journalists and the occasional novelist may write about them, A Long Way Gone is a first-person account.”

“Beah’s story is a wrenching survivor’s tale, but there’s no self-pity or political digression to be found. Raw and honest, A Long Way Gone is an important account of the ravages of war, and it’s most disturbing as a reminder of how easy it would be for any of us to break, to become unrecognizable in such extreme circumstances… Beah’s uncompromising voice is a potent elegy for their suffering, a powerful reminder of the innocent casualties of war.”

“Beah tells his amazing and agonizing story in a new memoir, A Long Way Gone. It is a story that pulls no punches as it describes a depravity that, until recently, has gone largely unnoticed… If you can read A Long Way Gone without being touched somewhere deep inside, you might need to think about changing the ice water in your veins.”

“With a clear eye and a steady cadence, [Beah] recounts how civil war punctured his rural boyhood and mutated him into a 13-year-old killer. Despite the carnage, few readers will be able to look away… Unlike Beasts of No Nation, last year’s acclaimed novel about child soldiers, Beah’s book stands on the power of witness. At the United Nations, he tells us, ‘I had a speech that had been written for me in Freetown, but I decided to speak from my heart, instead.’ So he has. And every reader of A Long Way Gone will be appalled and grateful.”

“That Beah survived at all, let alone survived with any capacity for hope and joy at all, is stunning, and testament to incredible courage—both his and that of the millions of men and women who fight against wars with eerie grace and grim patience. That Beah could then craft a memoir like this, in his second language no less, is astounding and even thrilling, for A Long Way Gone is a taut prose arrow against the twisted lies of wars. Whatever excuses and defenses and rationalizations we offer for war, whenever we say that war is any sort of rational act, Beah’s voice is now forever raised to call war what it is: madness.”

“Beah writes to recount, not to relive the ghastly memories, or to shock or guilt-trip his readers. His language is simple and his tone somewhat detached, as though to delimit the frightening reach of that world. Often, he relies on the distanced perspective of a storyteller. But when Beah is finally approached about the possibility of serving as a spokesperson on the issue of child soldiers, he knows exactly what he wants to tell the world: ‘“We can be rehabilitated,” I would emphasize, and point to myself as an example. I would always tell people that I believe children have the resilience to outlive their sufferings, if given a chance.’ Others may make the same assertions, but Beah has the advantage of stating them in the first person. That makes A Long Way Gone all the more gripping.”

“Beah is an eloquent writer who paints clear and poignant pictures of each circumstances he encountered on his journey as a boy who went from fearing the violence of the civil war in his country at age 12 too reveling in the torture of other human beings after being recruited by the government army at age 13… Beah’s memoir is a must-read for anyone who wants an education in the psychological impact of war on children.”

“A Long Way Gone, Beah’s harrowing account of the civil war in his native Sierra Leone, provides the fullest picture of just how inexorable the plunge into war is for many children… If Beah’s memoir depicts how easily children are lured into combat, it also examines how difficult it is for them to emerge from it.”

“Ishmael Beah knows that former child soldiers in war-ravaged African countries can reclaim their lives because that’s just what he did. In 1993, rebels in Sierra Leone killed 13-year-old Beah’s parents and two brothers, forcing him to join their bloody campaign for two years. Upon his release, he stayed at a rehabilitation center for six months with other formerly abducted children. Beah now lives in the United States, and he wrote a 2007 book about his transition from child soldier to college graduate. His inspiring story illustrates the resilience of children forced into committing unthinkable acts, especially if they receive treatment that blends with their cultures, as well as acceptance back into their home communities.”

“A fascinating theme in A Long Way Gone is the cultural mishmash that informs Beah’s memories. Readers even vaguely familiar with hip-hop and reggae will be both amused and shocked by the ways they shaped the author’s vision of war… Amid the war’s blood, filth and hunger, Beah also inserts… powerful fragments of traditional African folklore. His willingness to share the comfort that things like tall tales, the face of the moon, or the smell of traditional foods bring him is sobering. It is also evident how painful it is to record them… Scenes the author witnessed and participated in are described in gruesome detail… In place of a text that has every right to be a diatribe against Sierra Leone, globalization or even himself, 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 mothers, father 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 with a genuine and disarmingly emotional force.”

“Terrifying, often graphic in portraying the violence he both witnessed and carried out as a barely adolescent soldier in Sierra Leone, 26-year-old Beah’s story is also deeply moving, even uplifting… Reports about child soldiers and the crises in Africa proliferate, but Beah’s story, with its clear-eyed reporting and literate particularity—whether he’s dancing to rap, eating a coconut or running toward the burning village where his family is trapped—demands to be read.”

“Beah’s memoir, A Long Way Gone, is unforgettable testimony that Africa’s children—millions of them dying and orphaned by preventable diseases, hundreds of thousands of them forced into battle—have eyes to see and voices to tell what has happened. And what voices! How is it possible that 26-year-old Beah, a nonnative English speaker, separated from his family at age 12, taught to maim and to kill at 13, can sound such notes of family happiness, of friendship under duress, of quiet horror? No outsider could have written this book, and it’s hard to imagine that many insiders could do so with such acute vision, stark language, and tenderness. It is a heart-rending achievement.”

“Most of A Long Way Gone describes Ishmael’s life before and after he is forced to fight. He takes only 25 pages to describe the horrors and habits of his life as a guerilla. This brevity and the relative lack of interior dialogue or emotion throughout the book are as telling as the narrative. It is astounding that Ishmael survived at all, let alone that he is able to remember, sane enough to recount his experiences, and intelligent enough to do so in a foreign tongue, English. The sparse prose gives the sense that he wrote this memoir as much to mark his passage out of hell, in case he should again have to wonder there, as he did to enlighten us.”