Finished Reading: A Long Way Gone
5 Apr
The other night I couldn’t sleep – I was having stomach trouble from the pizza we’d had for dinner – and so I hunkered down on the couch with pillows and blankets and a book. I had started reading Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier earlier in the week, and read the rest of it in the middle of my sleepless night.
Although the book was desperately sad at times, the middle of the night turned out to be an amazingly engaging time to drink in this story. The silence, the dark, the solitude all leant themselves well to my becoming deeply immersed in the story of a boy living and struggling to survive in Sierra Leone in the 1990′s.
For so much of the book, Ishmael was alone, or felt alone, and was often in hiding, in darkness, and in fear. The book starts before he has experienced the war, and traces the time he spent hiding from the rebels and looking for his family, the time he spent as a forcibly recruited army solider, tracking and killing the rebels, and the time he spent in a center for the rehabilitation and “repatriatization” of child soldiers from both sides of the conflict.
It was scary, sad, and eye-opening. But also hopeful, in the end, because Ishmael was able to survive and finally leave Sierra Leone, finish his schooling in New York, graduate from Oberlin College, and become a voice for children’s rights around the world.
I was very glad to have read A Long Way Gone, and many of the messages will stay in my heart. Now, though, I’m turning to the most escapist fiction I have on hand, since this week also found us (as a community) facing a scary real-life situation in our area.
I read this one along time ago and it was our book club pick for this month. It is a truly riveting story. I really wanted to know more at the end. I have also taught this book in my high school geography class and most kids said it was the only assigned reading book they finished all year. they loved it. There is a clip of the author reading aloud a selection from the book on youtube. It is an excellent clip.
It sounds like one I’ll have to read!
I have heard about war and seen it on TV,but it didn’t realize how serious it is until I read A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah.The night of the day I stared reading the book, I had a nightmare.I dreamed that I was in Beah’s hometown,and people were screaming and running all over the places.Some of them had guns and were shooting anybody around them. When I woke up in the middle of the night,my pillow was wet because I had been crying during my sleep. This book really touched me. During my whole lecture, I felt like I was in Sierra Leone living the war and I could even visualized what was happpening in the book.