Along with millions of others in Sierra Leone, Ishmael Beah found his life torn from its mooring by the cataclysmic events of the 1991 civil war. He was 12 years old when he lost his family and became a wandering refugee, and by 15 he had joined the thousands of child soldiers waging war across the devastated nation. Though he grew up surrounded by atrocity, violence, and chaos, Beah somehow managed, with the help of a UNICEF-sponsored organization, to leave his soldier life behind, and eventually fled the country to America. Ishmael Beah's vivid, brilliant, and harrowing account is a gripping testament to the nature of life in a country where the foundation of civilization has crumbled and the concept of childhood has tragically disappeared.

In a heart-wrenching, candid autobiography, a human rights activist offers a firsthand account of war from the perspective of a former child soldier, detailing the violent civil war that wracked his native Sierra Leone and the government forces that transformed a gentle young boy into a killer as a member of the army. Reprint.

In a heart-wrenching, candid autobiography, a human rights activist offers a firsthand account of war from the perspective of a former child soldier, detailing the violent civil war that wracked his native Sierra Leone and the government forces that transformed a gentle young boy into a killer as a member of the army. Reprint.