A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
Ishmael Beah
A boy conscripted at twelve recalls the war that took his childhood.
Beah recounts being swept into Sierra Leone's civil war as a child, drugged and made to fight, then slowly rehabilitated by UNICEF workers and rebuilt into a civilian life. Written years later from the United States, the memoir gave many readers their first sustained account of child soldiers told from the inside. Questions later raised about some dates and details did not displace its testimonial force.
Its legacy. It became a widely assigned text on children in armed conflict.
- Author
- Ishmael Beah
- First published
- 2007
- Genre
- Memoir
- Theme
- Contemporary Voices, Memoir and Testimony
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