A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A Long Way Gone treats a child soldier as something assembled, and gives most of its length to the assembly. Ishmael Beah’s memoir, published in February 2007 by Sarah Crichton Books at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, carries one boy from twelve, running from an attack on his town in southern Sierra Leone, through the national army to a rehabilitation centre in Freetown at fifteen. The machinery is the subject: what, in Beah’s account, an army does to a grieving child to make him usable, and what reversing it costs. He writes both halves at the same flat pitch, and the evenness is the argument — on his telling neither process was mysterious, and only one was fast.

Ishmael Beah on SummaryShelf

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier