A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This was a really interesting memoir.
Sierra Leone is bookmarked in my head as an African country with atrocities that have been going on for decades. I have to admit, I sometimes confuse it with Sudan and Rwanda - but this book was a sad education on Sierra Leone itself through the eyes of Beah.
Beah is a young boy - not even a teen - when civil war erupts in SL. He and several of his friends end up on the run, their families killed, trying to figure out how to live in a war zone. It is unclear to the reader and probably the boys who is right and who is wrong in the conflict - there are rebels and a national army and they seem to blend into one military force.
Beah ends up recruited into the army at 13, drugged and manipulated, and becomes a soldier. It is only after several years that NGOs and the UN step in to rescue him and many other boys in his situation (on both sides of the conflict). It is a testament to his core as a person as well as help he receives along the way that he emerges from this trauma as an optimistic functioning human being.
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