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Title details for A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah - Available

A Long Way Gone

Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

by Ishmael Beah
Ishmael Beah
Audiobook
2 of 2 copies available
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2 of 2 copies available

In A Long Way Gone Ishmael Beah tells a riveting story in his own words: how, at the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels 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 how wars are fought now by children, hopped up on drugs, and wielding AK-47s. In the more than fifty violent conflicts going on worldwide, it is estimated that there are some 300,000 child soldiers.
Ishmael Beah used to be one of them. 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. But it is rare to find a first-person account from someone who endured this hell and survived.
This is a rare and mesmerizing account, told with real literary force and heartbreaking honesty.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Awards

  • Release date

    September 23, 2008

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781427202314
      • File size: 222719 KB
      • Duration: 07:43:59

  • Languages

    • English

  • Levels

    • Lexile® Measure: 920
    • Text Difficulty: 4-5

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      May 28, 2007
      Beah’s harrowing story of a boy caught up in the civil strife in Sierra Leone is not an audio to curl up with before bedtime. Beah’s even-toned narrative is particularly disturbing because it’s almost exactly the same whether he is enjoying the company of a newly found uncle or busy shooting and maiming rebels and even burying them alive. His monotone works particularly well when he is recounting his dreams, for he cannot distinguish his nightmares from his waking life. Beah speaks with a thick accent that omits “th” sounds. Many words are understandable in their context, but a few are not. He also stumbles over some longer and more complex words. Despite these drawbacks, Beah’s tale is a riveting snapshot of childhoods stolen from all too many, not just in Sierra Leone but in Somalia, Iraq, Palestine and other places ravaged by civil wars. Simultaneous release with the FSG hardcover (Reviews, Dec. 18).

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Ishmael Beah was just 11 when civil war ripped apart Sierra Leone and killed his parents and brothers. He became one of tens of thousands of child soldiers in that conflict, and in this disturbing memoir he describes how he survived almost three years of hell. He killed countless people, both in battle and by execution, all before he turned 16. He tells his story without self-pity or apology as he explains how he eventually came to understand that what happened was not his fault. Beah is not a trained narrator, and his accent is occasionally difficult to understand, but it's impossible to imagine how anyone else could read this intensely personal story with more power than he does. D.B. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from December 18, 2006
      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. Beah's harrowing journey transforms him overnight from a child enthralled by American hip-hop music and dance to an internal refugee bereft of family, wandering from village to village in a country grown deeply divided by the indiscriminate atrocities of unruly, sociopathic rebel and army forces. Beah then finds himself in the army—in a drug-filled life of casual mass slaughter that lasts until he is 15, when he's brought to a rehabilitation center sponsored by UNICEF and partnering NGOs. The process marks out Beah as a gifted spokesman for the center's work after his "repatriation" to civilian life in the capital, where he lives with his family and a distant uncle. When the war finally engulfs the capital, it sends 17-year-old Beah fleeing again, this time to the U.S., where he now lives. (Beah graduated from Oberlin College in 2004.) Told in clear, accessible language by a young writer with a gifted literary voice, this memoir seems destined to become a classic firsthand account of war and the ongoing plight of child soldiers in conflicts worldwide.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

Levels

  • Lexile® Measure:920
  • Text Difficulty:4-5

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