...A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, by Ishmael Beah illustrates Beah’s childhood under Sierra Leone's Civil war in the 1990s. The book recounts Beah’s experience as a 12 year old boy struggling to find his family. Although this book mainly follows Beah, it also gives a lot of insight on the instability in African countries like Sierra Leone. Ishmael Beah was a normal child before the Civil war in Sierra Leone, which is what the beginning of the book illustrates. In the early chapters, Beah talks about his childhood, which seemed to be very normal (Beah, 6). However, his childhood would take a drastic turn for the worse. When visiting his friends in Mattru Jong, Beah runs into swarms of people talking of rebellion. One passerby warned...
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...Some of the character traits that Ishmael shows in the beginning of the book is that he is a studious and innocent child. This quote is from before Ishmael is affected by the war, when he was a young boy at the age of eight and takes place in Mobimbi, a city in Sierra Leone. Ishmael, his brother and some friends like listening to rap and formed a dance group. Ishmael says, “The four of us had started a rap dance group when I was eight. We were first introduced to rap music during one of our visits to Mobimbi. […] I loved the dance, and particularly enjoyed learning the lyrics because they were poetic and it improved my vocabulary” (Beah,6). This quotation shows that before Ishmael became a soldier, he was an innocent child who liked to listen and dance to rap music with his brother and friends, much like kids...
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...Kamryn Frazier Mrs. Foster 10th Honors Lit/Comp Summer Reading A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by: Ishmael Beah Chapters 1-4 Quote Selection and Theme Analysis Theme: The Horrors of War “The sound of the guns was so terrifying it confused everyone. No one was able to think clearly. In a matter of seconds, people started screaming and running in different directions, pushing and trampling on whoever had fallen on the ground. No one had the time to take anything with them. Everyone just ran to save his or her life. Mothers lost their children, whose confused, sad cries coincided with the gunshots. Families were separated and left behind everything they had worked for their whole lives”(p. 23). This quotation...
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