The High School Book club read A Long Way Gone over the past month. It's an epic story of survival in war and the loss of childhood. Participants said the story was intense and depressing, but that they were glad they read it anyway.
The book left me wondering what Ishmael Beah did once he got to the U.S. He is still involved in international panels regarding armed children in conflict, including the UN, Religions for Peace Youth Assembly, Human Rights Watch, Council on Foreign Relations, and the Center for Emerging Threats and Opportunities.
He started writing in a class at Oberlin college and his teachers encouraged him to continue.
To see Ishmael Beah explain his own work, watch the videos at http://www.alongwaygone.com/media.html
If the story deepened your interest in the conflict in Sierra Leone and child soldiers around the world, there is lots more to explore.
UNICEF has a great resource about child soliders:
http://www.unicef.org/protection/files/Armed_Groups.pdf
The movie Blood Diamond takes place partly in Sierra Leone and explores the parts of the war that A Long Way Gone does not. It is about conflict diamonds and also about child soldiers in the rebel forces, contrasting the importance of a child with the importance of a jewel.
http://www.blooddiamondaction.org/
There was also some debate about the extent to which the account could have been fictionalized, and those views are best summarized in the Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Long_Way_Gone#Credibility_dispute
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