A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, by Ishmael Beah
St. Barnabas Anglican Church, 361 Danforth Ave.
A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, is a riveting memoir, destined to become an international best-seller, which recounts a remarkable story of war, survival and redemption–the first ever written by a former child soldier.
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 A Long Way Gone, Ishmael 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.
Ishmael Beah was born in Sierra Leone, West Africa. He spent three years as a boy soldier before he was rehabilitated. He came to the United States at 17 and now lives in New York City. He is a member of Human Rights Watch Children’s Division Advisory Committee and has spoken before the United Nations on several occasions.
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