A Long Way Gone
What is war like through the eyes of a child soldier? How does one become a killer? How does one stop? Child soldiers have been profiled by journalists, and novelists have often struggled to imagine their lives.
In the more than fifty conflicts going on worldwide, it is estimated there are now some 300,000 child soldiers.
A few months ago 4th Estate’s Editorial Director, Mitzi Angel, signed up the memoir of Ishmael Beah. She tells me that at the age of twelve, Beah fled attacking rebels in Sierra Leone and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By thirteen, he’d been picked up by the government army when, for a number of circumstantial reasons, he found he was capable of ‘truly terrible acts’. Beah came to the United States when he was seventeen, and graduated from Oberlin College in 2003. He now lives in New York City and has addressed the UN on several occasions.
What must surely strike anyone who hears Baeh speak or reads his text is the humanity of someone who was once capable of commiting acts we’d quickly label ‘inhuman’.
Five years ago, after reading a tranche of books on Nazi Germany, I searched quite hard for a book that didn’t treat the landmark events of the 20th century as narrative history so much as analysis into the pyschological make-up and circumstances that create mankind’s often-catastrophic story. An answer to the ‘Why’ as much as the ‘What’ and ‘When’, if you like.
The closest I found at that time was a profoundly well-written and necessary book, Humanity by Jonathan Glover (Pimlico), which is still in print. You can read the first chapter of that book here, care of the New York Times.
Meanwhile, I think Ishmael Baeh’s book, A Long Way Gone, promises to be a different but equally valid attempt at such an answer, told from a literary and personal perspective. We’ll publish in May 2007.
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