colleen_parks 's review for:

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah

4.0

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He wrote this from his point of view as a child and so it is missing some of the larger context and emotional insights you might expect from a book like this. Nonetheless, I really liked this book. After having seen several documentaries on Rwanda, the atrocities he details here were maybe less surprising than they should be, although still pretty horrendous. I found it particularly eye-opening with respect to the challenges of rehabilitating child soldiers, and it raises larger questions about the possibilities and means of rehabilitation of people who have experienced and/or committed such violent acts in general.