A Long Way Gone

                In my world humanities class, we are reading the book A Long Way Gone by Ishmeal Beah. The book is a lot different than previous reads in other Language Arts classes. For one, it is more recent than Shakespeare or Charles Dickens which means that the book obviously contains more recent events. The book is also a lot more graphic and it has detailed descriptions of everything.

                It is about the author’s journey as a child soldier and the wars in Sierra Leone. Beah wrote about his life before the war, before he was a child soldier, when he was a child soldier, and after he was no longer a child soldier. He puts everything in vivid descriptions because that is how he remembered it and didn’t want to put on “rose colored glasses.”

                This book is extra striking to me because of what this twelve year old boy is actually going through. The book portrays scenes that are worse than a horror film more so because they are real. He describes people with intestines falling out, dismembered body parts, gushing blood, and maggot covered bodies. It is not just the descriptions however that make this book so astonishing though, I think that it is the actual journey that this boy takes.

                He lost his family in the first chapter and only has his brother with him and a few friends. They try to find their family instead of running and when the rebels attack the village that they were staying in, he begins to run but it proves to be a lot more difficult than what one might think. It is so difficult that the boys even go back to their village full of rebels to look for food or money to buy food.

                It is one thing trying to survive all on your own, but a whole other thing to be dealing with the graphic images of war and the loss of family members in all of it. (331)