LIBRARY NOTES
 
At age twelve, Ishmael Beah lived with his family in a small town in Sierra Leone and dreamed of American hip-hop and dance. Then town and family were destroyed in the country's bloody civil war, and he was picked up by a government militia. By age thirteen, Beah had become one of the world's 300,000 child soldiers, forced through drug addiction and threats to commit atrocities. Three years later, Beah was released to a UNICEF rehabilitation center, where he struggled to regain his humanity and reenter the civilian world.
A Long Way Gone is the first comprehensive first-person account of this widespread phenomenon by a child soldier rather than a journalist or novelist. Author Sebastian Junger says it is "one of the most important war stories of our generation. The arming of children is among the greatest evils of the modern world, and yet we know so little about it because the children themselves are swallowed up by the very wars they are forced to wage. Ishmael Beah has not only emerged intact from this chaos, he has become one of its most eloquent chroniclers. We ignore his message at our peril."
Ishmael Beah, now resident in the United States, graduated from Oberlin College in 2004. He is a member of Human Rights Watch Children's Rights Division Advisory Committee and has spoken before the United Nations on several occasions.
A Long Way Gone is his first book.
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