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A Long Way Gone
- Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
- Narrated by: Ishmael Beah
- Length: 7 hrs and 43 mins
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Publisher's summary
In A Long Way Gone Ishmael Beah tells a riveting story in his own words: how, at the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By thirteen, he'd been picked up by the government army, and Beah, at heart a gentle boy, found that he was capable of truly terrible acts.
This is how wars are fought now by children, hopped up on drugs, and wielding AK-47s. In the more than fifty violent conflicts going on worldwide, it is estimated that there are some 300,000 child soldiers.
Ishmael Beah used to be one of them. How does one become a killer? How does one stop? Child soldiers have been profiled by journalists, and novelists have struggled to imagine their lives. But it is rare to find a first-person account from someone who endured this hell and survived.
This is a rare and mesmerizing account, told with real literary force and heartbreaking honesty.
Critic reviews
“A Long Way Gone 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.” —Sebastian Junger, author of A Death in Belmont and A Perfect Storm
“This is a beautifully written book about a shocking war and the children who were forced to fight it. Ishmael Beah describes the unthinkable in calm, unforgettable language; his memoir is an important testament to the children elsewhere who continue to be conscripted into armies and militias.” —Steve Coll, author of Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for general Nonfiction
“A Long Way Gone hits you hard in the gut with Sierra Leone's unimaginable brutality and then it touches your soul with unexpected acts of kindness. Ishmael Beah's story tears your heart to pieces and then forces you to put it back together again, because if Beah can emerge from such horror with his humanity in tact, it's the least you can do.” —Jeannette Walls, author of The Glass Castle: A Memoir
Featured Article: The top 100 memoirs of all time
All genres considered, the memoir is among the most difficult and complex for a writer to pull off. After all, giving voice to your own lived experience and recounting deeply painful or uncomfortable memories in a way that still engages and entertains is a remarkable feat. These autobiographies, often narrated by the authors themselves, shine with raw, unfiltered emotion sure to resonate with any listener. But don't just take our word for it—queue up any one of these listens, and you'll hear exactly what we mean.
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Bee lost his father as a young boy and keenly felt his orphanhood. He would wander from one neighbor to the next, collecting the things they said to each other, whispering the words to himself at night until one day a song was born. Bee sings the life of his people through the war-torn jungle and a Thai refugee camp. But the songs fall away in the cold, bitter world of a Minneapolis housing project and on the factory floor until, with the death of Bee's mother, the songs leave him for good.
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Beautiful, full of sadness, power, and heart.
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By: Kao Kalia Yang
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Slave
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Mende Nazer tells the story of her kidnap, at age 12, from an idyllic life with her family in a village in Sudan, and being sold into slavery. Trafficked to Europe and the London home of a diplomat, Nazer escaped - only to find she had to fight for asylum.
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Heartbreaking dose of reality
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By: Mende Nazar, and others
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I, Who Did Not Die
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Khorramshahr, Iran, May 1982 - It was the bloodiest battle of one of the most brutal wars of the twentieth century, and Najah, a 29-year-old wounded Iraqi conscript, was face to face with a 13-year-old Iranian child soldier who was ordered to kill him. Instead, the boy committed an astonishing act of mercy. It was an act that decades later would save his own life.
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A must read do not pass on this as a person of both historical, military, political,sociological as well as a true story that
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Stars Between the Sun and Moon
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Born in 1970s North Korea, Lucia Jang grew up in a typical household - her parents worked in the factories, and the family scraped by on rations. Nightly she bowed to her photo of Kim Il-Sung. It was the beginning of a chaotic period with a decade-long famine. Jang married an abusive man who sold their baby. She left him and went home to help her family by illegally crossing the river to China to trade goods. She was caught and imprisoned twice.
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Fantastic story. Well read.
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Remember Us
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Story
Remember Us is a look back at the lost world of the shtetl: a wise Zayde offering prophetic and profound words to his grandson, the rich experience of Shabbos, and the treasure of a loving family. All this is torn apart with the arrival of the Holocaust, beginning a crucible fraught with twists and turns so unpredictable and surprising that they defy any attempt to find reason within them. Through the eyes of 91-year-old Holocaust survivor Martin Small, we learn that these priceless memories that are too painful to remember are also too painful to forget.
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A Tragic and Rich Life, With Lessons For All
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By: Vic Shayne, and others
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When Heaven and Earth Changed Places
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
This haunting memoir tells the brutal story of the Vietnam War from the perspective of an innocent victim whose childhood was dominated by violence, devastation, and conflicts between the teachings of her culture and the realities of war. The youngest in a close-knit Buddhist family, Le Ly Hayslip was 12 years old when U.S. helicopters landed in her village. She was raped and "ruined" for marriage by Viet Cong soldiers, imprisoned and tortured by the South Vietnamese, and sentenced to death by the Viet Cong. Ultimately fleeing to the U.S. with her children, she finally found peace, and in 1986, she was reunited with her family in Vietnam. The story of her homecoming, interwoven with her memories of the war years, paints a vivid picture of a noble, optimistic woman and her native country.
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Difficult to listen to
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By: Le Ly Hayslip, and others
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Overall
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Aminah lives an idyllic life until she is brutally separated from her home and forced on a journey that turns her from a daydreamer into a resilient woman. Wurche, the willful daughter of a chief, is desperate to play an important role in her father's court. These two women's lives converge as infighting among Wurche's people threatens the region, during the height of the slave trade at the end of the nineteenth century. The Hundred Wells of Salaga offers a remarkable view of slavery and how the scramble for Africa affected the lives of everyday people.
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She Would Be King
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Wayétu Moore’s powerful debut novel, She Would Be King, reimagines the dramatic story of Liberia’s early years through three unforgettable characters who share an uncommon bond. Gbessa, exiled from the West African village of Lai, is starved, bitten by a viper, and left for dead, but still she survives. June Dey, raised on a plantation in Virginia, hides his unusual strength until a confrontation with the overseer forces him to flee. Norman Aragon, the child of a white British colonizer and a Maroon slave from Jamaica, can fade from sight when the earth calls him.
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Beautiful example of magical realism.
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Christophe has been in the New World only a year when his native guides abandon him to flee their Iroquois pursuers. A Huron warrior and elder named Bird soon takes him prisoner, along with a young Iroquois girl, Snow Falls, whose family he has just killed, and holds them captive in his massive village. Champlain's Iron People have only recently begun trading with the Huron, who mistrust them as well as this Crow who has now trespassed onto their land; and her people, of course, have become the Huron's greatest enemy.
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Thoughtful and interesting, if not always gripping
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Tears of the Desert
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Halima Bashir was born into the Zaghawa tribe, whose customs have remained unchanged for centuries, in the remote western deserts of Sudan in the region of South Darfur. Halima's father named his daughter after the traditional medicine woman of the village, and she grew up in a happy and close-knit childhood environment. Her father became a wealthy man by his tribe's standards, so he could afford to send Halima to school and university. Halima went on to study medicine, and at 24 she returned to her tribe and began practicing as their first ever qualified doctor.
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A story that takes you there
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My Brother's Voice
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Stephen 'Pista' Nasser was 13 years old when the Nazis whisked him and his family away from their home in Hungary to Auschwitz. His memories of that terrifying experience are still vivid, and his love for his brother Andris still brings a husky tone to his voice when he remembers the terrible ordeal they endured together. Stephen's account of the Holocaust, told in the refreshingly direct and optimistic language of a young boy, will help every listener to understand that the Holocaust was real.
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my favorite I've read it 5 times
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The Lightless Sky
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In 2006, after his father was killed, Gulwali Passarlay was caught between the Taliban, who wanted to recruit him, and the Americans, who wanted to use him. To protect her son, Gulwali's mother sent him away. The search for safety would lead the 12-year-old across eight countries, from the mountains of Eastern Afghanistan through Iran and Europe to Britain. Over the course of 12 harrowing months, Gulwali endured imprisonment, hunger, cruelty, brutality, loneliness, and terror - and nearly drowned crossing the Mediterranean Sea.
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A Face for Refugees
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Under the Same Sky
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A searing story of starvation and survival in North Korea, followed by a dramatic escape, rescue by activists and Christian missionaries, and success in the United States thanks to newfound faith and courage.
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Tugs at the heart strings
- By R3v13w3r on 07-15-15
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What listeners say about A Long Way Gone
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- B. Bunt
- 11-01-13
Author's voice
What did you like best about this story?
I appreciated that the account was written and narrated by a boy with first-hand experience. He explains his fear and struggle for survival from his own experiences and you begin to understand, reluctantly, how an innocent child with such a big heart could perform such atrocities. You also learn that these tainted children, at least some of them, have the capacity for rehabilitation and the ability to attain happiness after such horrible experiences full of hatred and violence. His story makes you question humanity, but his survival and recovery will return hope and faith of the good in this world. This book makes you want to become an activist for the plight of these children and their families.
What about Ishmael Beah’s performance did you like?
I like that it was his story; it added to the narrative knowing it was his experiences he was telling you about.
Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?
It did get under my skin and I had a hard time not thinking about it when I was away.
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18 people found this helpful
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- EmilyK
- 11-19-17
Meaningful true story
My son and I listened to this when it was required reading in high school. It is a difficult book but I'm glad I heard the story. It was an important insight into what is happening in the world today.
Normally, I don't like author-narrators but this was one situation where I really appreciated hearing the author's voice.
Both my sons have listened to this book, and I think it is an important read for any teen or adult.
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15 people found this helpful
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- Michael
- 04-22-15
Intense, but not intense enough
This is a story of a 12 year old boy’s life as a child soldier in Sierra Leone. The writing is first person and author narrated, but did not strike me as intensely personal, or brutally honest, or deeply introspective. It effectively tells the story of how a normal kid becomes a killer, and then returns to some level of normalcy. If you are not familiar with the issue of child soldiers, this book is an excellent introduction.
I expect quite a lot from a memoir. In this case I heard the author’s intense story, but I also felt the author held back the very worst and the potentially most powerful. It is completely understandable for a young man (now 26) to be unready to express the fullness of the story, but a memoir should await that readiness.
The narration is good, but a bit dry and in a very few places difficult to understand.
I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand the issues surrounding child soldiers, but as a memoir, or as literature, I found it weak.
There is an appendix dryly recapping the history of Sierra Leone which seemed a pretty odd way to end a memoir.
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12 people found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 04-17-14
Fascinating and tragic story
If you could sum up A Long Way Gone in three words, what would they be?
Sad yet hopeful.
What did you like best about this story?
I like that he was able to be rescued from the life of child soldier and go on to present about these issues at the UN.
What does Ishmael Beah bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?
It's his memories. One thing is when he signs some of the songs that made him happy as a kid, you can tell they still do.
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9 people found this helpful
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- JCH
- 10-26-17
Moving and important memoir
This is an excellent memoir, and an important one. However, I agree with other reviews that the ending is abrupt and leaves something to be desired. The author owed it to his audience to give us more information about his departure from Sierra Leone, and transition to his new life. Also, I read this book because it was assigned to my 8th grader. I do not feel this book is appropriate for this grade level. It is too explicitly violent and disturbing, and may even glamorize the use of drugs in this age group. I have expressed my concerns to my daughter's school. I recommend this book for high schoolers, but not middle schoolers.
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6 people found this helpful
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- Heidi Eaves
- 12-31-18
Great Author, but...
Listening to this book was a real Struggle Bus experience. I love this story. My teenage students who have reading disabilities and hate books LOVE this story. Listening to Beah read his story killed it. And I don't mean in a good way! His voice is better heard reading the look than listening to it.
For those who want know exactly why - it's because he is so monotonous. There isn't a lot of variety in his voice. He does not change his voice pattern for the different characters, etc.
So, while this is a good read and I recommend getting your hands on a physical copy from the store or the local library, I would not recommend the audiobook.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Charles Andre, Jr.
- 12-31-14
An Eye-opening Read.
I am very glad to have opened myself up to the harsh reality that others have experienced. My life and the way I see things have truly changed.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Scott Jackson
- 05-16-19
Amazing Retell
Ishmael’s ability to retell his childhood story over a number of years in great detail is amazing. The story is just further evidence of how spoiled and blessed we are here in the states.
The story is really broken into 3 chunks:
1) Ishmael and his friends on the run from rebel fighters
2) Ishmael as boy soldier fighting against the Rebels
3) His journey through rehabilitation. This is really the most intriguing as it shows the boys lust for vengeance and evil after being brainwashed in it killing the rebels and seeking revenge. The rehabs team commitment to patiently loving them and being persistent is a really neat story.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Carlos Ulloa
- 04-23-15
Loved
This book was amazing. I read a lot and I've never read something like this!! I'm happy I Read It
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3 people found this helpful
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- Jake
- 10-03-13
Excellent Read
Where does A Long Way Gone rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?
A Long Way Gone is among the top 20 Audiobooks I've heard.
What other book might you compare A Long Way Gone to and why?
Pertaining to the corrupt use of power and the effects of agency I would say Killing Pablo was another captivating book describing evil.
Which character – as performed by Ishmael Beah – was your favorite?
Nurse Esther was the most inspiring character who brought Ishmael back through love.
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2 people found this helpful