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A review by ejrathke
A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah
4.0
An interesting memoir for plenty of reasons but I think what interests me most about the memoir itself is how flat and declarative the narration is.
This is a book about being a child soldier in Sierra Leone, but it mostly skips over the two years he spent as a soldier and all the atrocities he enacted and witnessed. It beings with him as a normal child with a love for american rap music and follows the terror and anxiety of being on the run from the revolutionary army. Even before he was a soldier, he sees the distrust that looms over him because he's an adolescent boy without a family traveling with other adolescent boys. Which is to say, everyone already assumes he's a soldier committed to murder and pillaging and chaos in general.
Once he's captured, we get a glimpse into the training and some of the brutality he carried out in the name of the Sierra Leone army against the revolutionary forces, but we largely skip over his two years as a soldier. I imagine there are a billion reasons for this but it does sort of mean that you're not getting what you probably want from this book. I mean, that sounds cold, but the reason I picked this book up is because I wanted a deep look into the life of a child soldier because extreme behavior holds a bit of fascination for me.
Anyrate, we pick up when he's sent from the army to rehabilitation. This is actually quite interesting since we see the kind boy he was before his days of soldiering and then are immediately thrust into this drug addicted, violent young man. So we see how transformative his soldiering was. This may be the most interesting part of the book since we do get some juxtaposed scenes of extreme violence and serenity.
However, the memoir largely holds us at an arm's length. Like I said, it's a very declarative book with little emotion in it. It reminds me of Hemingway, which may or may not be a good sign for you, depending on your preferences. For me, it wasn't a great reading experience, interesting as the story was.
Your enjoyment of this book will largely depend on how you react to the somewhat emotionless narration of extreme events. The book also manages to not really fill out the context of what's happening in Sierra Leone. And since that's the kind of stuff I like to know about, it left me wanting there as well.
So I did not love this book. I probably didn't even like it.
At the same time, it's hard to criticize someone who went through this for not making their story a pleasant read. I imagine it was quite uncomfortable for him to recount the events of his early life. I imagine that's why he skipped over the bulk of his days as a soldier.
But, yeah, it's just not what I wanted out of the book, which is really not the book's fault.
This is a book about being a child soldier in Sierra Leone, but it mostly skips over the two years he spent as a soldier and all the atrocities he enacted and witnessed. It beings with him as a normal child with a love for american rap music and follows the terror and anxiety of being on the run from the revolutionary army. Even before he was a soldier, he sees the distrust that looms over him because he's an adolescent boy without a family traveling with other adolescent boys. Which is to say, everyone already assumes he's a soldier committed to murder and pillaging and chaos in general.
Once he's captured, we get a glimpse into the training and some of the brutality he carried out in the name of the Sierra Leone army against the revolutionary forces, but we largely skip over his two years as a soldier. I imagine there are a billion reasons for this but it does sort of mean that you're not getting what you probably want from this book. I mean, that sounds cold, but the reason I picked this book up is because I wanted a deep look into the life of a child soldier because extreme behavior holds a bit of fascination for me.
Anyrate, we pick up when he's sent from the army to rehabilitation. This is actually quite interesting since we see the kind boy he was before his days of soldiering and then are immediately thrust into this drug addicted, violent young man. So we see how transformative his soldiering was. This may be the most interesting part of the book since we do get some juxtaposed scenes of extreme violence and serenity.
However, the memoir largely holds us at an arm's length. Like I said, it's a very declarative book with little emotion in it. It reminds me of Hemingway, which may or may not be a good sign for you, depending on your preferences. For me, it wasn't a great reading experience, interesting as the story was.
Your enjoyment of this book will largely depend on how you react to the somewhat emotionless narration of extreme events. The book also manages to not really fill out the context of what's happening in Sierra Leone. And since that's the kind of stuff I like to know about, it left me wanting there as well.
So I did not love this book. I probably didn't even like it.
At the same time, it's hard to criticize someone who went through this for not making their story a pleasant read. I imagine it was quite uncomfortable for him to recount the events of his early life. I imagine that's why he skipped over the bulk of his days as a soldier.
But, yeah, it's just not what I wanted out of the book, which is really not the book's fault.