Reviews

The following are excerpts from reviews on the book.

The Wall Street Journal

"By age 13, Ishmael Beah, a child soldier in Sierra Leone in West Africa, was an accomplished killer who showed neither remorse nor pity, even when committing terrible acts of violence. In "A Long Way Gone," he writes about how this happened: losing his innocence and descending into savagery but then slowly and painfully regaining his humanity."

Entertainment Weekly

"Americans tend to regard African conflicts as somewhat vague events signified by horrendous concepts--massacres, genocide, mutilation--that are best kept safely at a distance. Such a disconnect might prove impossible after reading A Long Way Gone, Beah's account of his life as a teenage soldier during Sierra Leone's civil war of the 1990s." Rating: B+

Christian Science Monitor

"Imagine that, by age 25, the UN had appointed you as its spokesperson, Starbucks had selected your memoir as the second book ever to be offered for sale in its cafes, and Playboy was using you to model leather jackets by Armani. Compared to all that he's already experienced, adjusting to fame in America should not be a daunting task for Ishmael Beah. That's fortunate, because he is about to become even more well-known for A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, the story of his experience as a child soldier in Sierra Leone, where civil war killed an estimated 50,000 people between 1991 and 2002."

The New Yorker

"In 1993, when the author was twelve, rebel forces attacked his home town, in Sierra Leone, and he was separated from his parents. For months, he straggled through the war-torn countryside, starving and terrified, until he was taken under the wing of a Shakespeare-spouting lieutenant in the government army. Soon, he was being fed amphetamines and trained to shoot an AK-47 ('Ignore the safety pin, they said, it will only slow you down'). Beah's memoir documents his transformation from a child into a hardened, brutally efficient soldier who high-fived his fellow-recruits after they slaughtered their enemies--often boys their own age--and who 'felt no pity for anyone.' His honesty is exacting, and a testament to the ability of children 'to outlive their sufferings, if given a chance.'"

People Magazine

"Terrifying, often graphic in portraying the violence he both witnessed and carried out as a barely adolescent soldier in Sierra Leone, 26-year-old Beah's story is also deeply moving, even uplifting." Rating: 4 stars

The New York Times Book Review

"What is it about African wars that is so disturbing? Why do they unsettle us so? We in the civilized West know all about bestial and mindless cruelty, as the events of 1939-45 graphically prove. And yet as we read about Darfur and Mogadishu today and recall Rwanda and Sierra Leone not long ago, or Biafra and Congo further back, we realize that these vicious, bitter African conflicts have left their trace on contemporary history, and on contemporary consciousness, in ways somehow different from the usual squalid reckoning that modern warfare encourages. The great benefit of Ishmael Beah's memoir, 'A Long Way Gone,' is that it may help us arrive at an understanding of this situation. Beah's autobiography is almost unique, as far as I can determine -- perhaps the first time that a child soldier has been able to give literary voice to one of the most distressing phenomena of the late 20th century: the rise of the pubescent (or even prepubescent) warrior-killer."

Time Magazine

"They were orphans. Some of them killed. Now the entertainment industry is all over them. Ishmael Beah doesn't realize it, but he's about to become a rock star. Well, the literary-humanitarian equivalent of a rock star. (I'll eat my hat if he does not meet Bono in the next 12 months.) Beah, 26, slight and handsome with a ready but wary smile, has written a memoir, and it's a doozy."

The Guardian UK

"As the media grows increasingly concerned with our private lives, and individuals in the west have come to understand that the quickest route to fame is to shamelessly reveal all, the art of the memoir has become debased. It is as if we now live in a perpetual present where memory has currency only as a means of securing social standing. It is into this culture of the mundane, melodramatic and often downright stupid that Ishmael Beah's memoir A Long Way Gone is thrust. It may seem strange to greet with relief a book that chronicles the brutal life of a former child soldier, but given what our society considers printworthy, it is refreshing that the memories and reflections of 26-year-old Ishmael Beah receive attention."

Kirkus Reviews

"The survivor of a dirty war in starkest Africa recounts his transition from 12-year-old orphan to killing machine. To emerge from Sierra Leone's malignant civil conflict and eventually graduate from college in the U.S. marks Beah as very unusual, if not unique. His memoir seeks to illuminate the process that created, and continues to create, one of the most pitiable yet universally feared products of modern warfare: the boy soldier."

Publishers Weekly

"This absorbing account by a young man who, as a boy of 12, gets swept up in Sierra Leone's civil war goes beyond even the best journalistic efforts in revealing the life and mind of a child abducted into the horrors of warfare. Beah's harrowing journey transforms him overnight from a child enthralled by American hip-hop music and dance to an internal refugee bereft of family, wandering from village to village in a country grown deeply divided by the indiscriminate atrocities of unruly, sociopathic rebel and army forces. Beah then finds himself in the army--in a drug-filled life of casual mass slaughter that lasts until he is 15, when he's brought to a rehabilitation center sponsored by UNICEF and partnering NGOs."

Library Journal

"Rarely does one encounter anything but outrage, sadness, and pain when reading about the exploitation of child soldiers, but Beah's account also offers hope, humility, bravery, and, yes, peace."

Booklist

"The prose is flat, almost detached, as the writer speaks quietly of what he witnessed, and what he did, as a young teen soldier in Sierra Leone. It could be a kids' war game, but it was real."