2008 Mayor's Book Club - Keep Austin Reading
Introduction and Current Book
2008 marks the seventh year of the Mayor’s Book Club in Austin, a city-wide reading campaign designed to create a community experience through reading and discussing a shared book. The book selected for 2008 is A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007) by Ishmael Beah.
Along with book discussions in April, there will be events exploring the wider themes of the book: child soldiers and children’s rights, the human consequences of war, and redemption and rehabilitation of victims of violence. The author will also visit Austin and participate in a special event on April 25. A complete schedule of events is available on the Austin Public Library website.
The book can be checked out at all Austin Public Library locations, the Benson Library on the UT campus, and purchased at local bookstores.
About the Author
Ishmael Beah was born in Sierra Leone in 1980. He moved to the United States in 1998 and finished his last two years of high school at the United Nations International School in New York. In 2004 he graduated from Oberlin College with a B.A. in political science.
He is a member of the Human Rights Watch Children’s Rights Division Advisory Committee and has spoken before the United Nations, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Center for Emerging Threats and Opportunities (CETO) at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory, and many other NGO panels on children affected by the war. He lives in New York City.
Photo by John Madere
A Long Way Gone Reviewed
By Emma Alpert
Developments in warfare have led to a dilemma of definitions in our effort to understand contemporary international conflicts. Blurring lines between victims and violators, modern wars are creating uncharted territory in debates on human rights. In the absence of adequate terms, authors of social justice literature attempt to make sense of new questions through a variety of literary processes. As a result, the war narrative has become an increasingly diverse, complicated, and devastating genre. A poignant illustration of this shift is the phenomenon of the child soldier and the emerging body of literature on the topic.
Current data suggests that more than 300,000 child soldiers are serving in conflicts around the world. An unlikely melding of childhood and warfare, child soldiering creates both disillusion and discomfort in the discourse on social justice and children’s rights. In her report on the legal status of child soldiers, Tanya Monforte (2007) writes, “Like the mad seer, the child soldier is portrayed as another archetype of an unnatural combination of truth and irrationality.” The term child soldier thus becomes a paradox, shattering our conception of children strictly as innocents and questioning the role and rights of children in war.
Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier attempts to make sense of the transitional place of children in war. Beah was eleven when civil war erupted in his country, Sierra Leone, a former British colony in West Africa. From 1991 to 1998, Beah roamed the war-torn ground of his home, bearing witness to and participating in the violent conflict that is the subject of his book. Later rescued by aid workers, Beah moved to the United States where he finished high school and graduated from Oberlin College in 2004. Beah, now twenty-six has become a vocal advocate for children affected by war, participating in efforts by Human Rights Watch, the United Nations, and other nongovernmental organizations to raise awareness and provide services for children in conflict and post-conflict regions.
Read the full review of A Long Way Gone
More Reviews of A Long Way Gone:
Beah speaks in a distinctive voice, and he tells an important story.
— The Wall Street Journal
A Long Way Gone makes you wonder how anyone comes through such unrelenting ghastliness and horror with his humanity and sanity intact. Unusually, the smiling, open face of the author on the book jacket provides welcome and timely reassurance. Ishmael Beah seems to prove it can happen.
— The New York Times
Beah’s memoir documents his transformation from a child into a hardened, brutally efficient soldier who high-fived his fellow-recruits after they slaughtered their enemies—often boys their own age—and who “felt no pity for anyone.” His honesty is exacting, and a testament to the ability of children “to outlive their sufferings, if given a chance.”
— The New Yorker
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.
— Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
For More Information:
For further information or questions, please contact the
Institute at
(512) 471-2654 or
community@humanitiesinstitute.utexas.edu.