A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah

Title: A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

Author: Ishmael Beah

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition

Release date: August 2008

Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 978-0374531263

Summary:

Amazon:
"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. The process marks out Beah as a gifted spokesman for the center's work after his "repatriation" to civilian life in the capital, where he lives with his family and a distant uncle. When the war finally engulfs the capital, it sends 17-year-old Beah fleeing again, this time to the U.S., where he now lives. (Beah graduated from Oberlin College in 2004.) Told in clear, accessible language by a young writer with a gifted literary voice, this memoir seems destined to become a classic firsthand account of war and the ongoing plight of child soldiers in conflicts worldwide"


-http://www.amazon.com/Long-Way-Gone-Memoirs-Soldier/dp/0374531269/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1288561280&sr=1-1


In the classroom:
Because this book takes place within the past decade, kids can really connect with the issue at hand and the age that the author is throughout the story.  Told as a memoir, the students get a first hand experience of what life would have been like had they grown up as a boy soldier.  This book can be used in a classroom to get the students involved in global issues and become strong individuals who can over come any obstacle that may be put into their own lives.