A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah
by Lillian Bonar
Essay: A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah
Pages: 11
Rating: 3 stars
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• A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah.pdf
• A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah.doc
Book Summary
In A Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beah, a former boy soldier with the Sierra Leone army during its civil war(19912002) with the rebels of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), provides an extraordinary and heartbreaking
account of the war, his experience as a child soldier and his days at a rehabilitation center. At the age of twelve,
when the RUF rebels attack his village named Mogbwemo in Sierro Leone, while he is away with his brother and
some friends, his life takes a major twist. While seeking news of his family, Beah and his friends find themselves
constantly running and hiding as they desperately strive to survive in a land rendered unrecognizable by violence.
During this time, he loses his dear ones and left alone in the wilderness, is forced to face many physical and
psychological dangers. By thirteen, he has been picked up by the government army, and is conditioned to fight in
the war by being provided with as many drugs as he could consume (cocaine and marijuana), rudimentary
training, and an AK-47. In the next two years, Beah goes on a mind-bending killing spree to avenge the death of
his dear ones. At sixteen, he was picked up by UNICEF, and through the help of the staff at the rehabilitation
center, he learns to forgive himself and to regain his humanity.
Document Analysis
During the author’s life in New York and Oberlin College, he understood that people who have not experienced
being in a war do not understand what the chaos of a war does to a human being. And once the western media
started sensationalizing the violence in Sierra Leone without any human context, people started relating Sierra
Leone to civil war, madness and amputations only as that was all that was spoken about. So he wrote this book
out o...
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