a long way gone

here is another book, A Long Way Gone, by Ishmael Beah, the first hand story of a real child soldier from Sierra Leone. my roommate just finished it and i started reading it before i went to bed. it seems like a pretty quick, but good and heart-wrenching, read. it's about 200 pages. anyway, here's what the back cover says:

'Why did you leave Sierra Leone?'
'Because there is a war.'
'Did you witness some of the fighting?'
'Everybody in the country did.'
'Cool.'
I smile a little.
'You should tell us about it sometime.'
'Yes, sometime.'

This is the story of Ishmael Beah's childhood - how, aged just 12, he fled from rebels attacking his village to wander a violent land, before being conscripted into the army -- where he learnt that he too was capable of terrible acts. Once he emerged he decided to tell his story, a story of loss of innocence and the power of redemption.

This is the first first-hand account of how wars are now fought: by children, on drugs, with AK-47s. In more than fifty conflicts going on worldwide, there are an estimated 300,000 child soldiers. Ishmael Beah was one of them.

What does war look like through the eyes of a child soldier? How does one become a killer? How does one stop? Child soldiers have been profiled by journalists, and novelists have struggled to imagine their lives. But it is rare to find a first-person account from someone who endured this hell and survived.

In A LONG WAY GONE: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, Beah, now twenty-six years old, tells a powerfully gripping story: At the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By thirteen, he’d been picked up by the government army, and Beah, at heart a gentle boy, found that he was capable of truly terrible acts. At sixteen, he was removed from fighting by UNICEF, and through the help of the staff at his rehabilitation center, he learned how to forgive himself, to regain his humanity, and, finally, to heal.

This is an extraordinary and mesmerizing account, told with real literary force and heartbreaking honesty.