A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
Why this book?
Despite having worked in war zones for over a decade including responding to the first genocide of the twenty-first century in Darfur I found Ishmael Beah’s book about his life as a child soldier confronting. Maybe I was always one step removed from the people who were doing the killing or the war in Sierra Leone was particularly debased. Either way, this is a difficult book to read because it shows us in vivid detail the terrible life of gun-totting children. Every time I put the book down, the images painted by Beah lingered in my mind for days on end. A Long Way Gone, takes you into the hurt, anguish, and pain of a young boy separated from his family and forced to make a diabolical choice—kill or be killed.