Ishmael

Dear Ishmael Beah, I am writing to you in regards to your bestselling memoir A Long Way Gone published on February 13th, 2007. I have been a fan of yours for quite some time, but have been convinced by clear evidence gathered that there are some inaccuracy in your memoir. I firmly believe that this memoir contains embellishments and exaggeration on your experience as a child soldier. Several articles have been published explaining controversial facts mentioned in your story that don’t seem…

A Long Walk to Water, by Linda Sue Park, is about an 11-year-old boy named Salva. He lives in Southern Sudan in 1985, during the Second Sudanese Civil War. He ends up having to flee his village, Loun-Ariik, not knowing if he will ever see his family again. The factors that made survival possible for Salva are individuals, such as Uncle, groups/organizations, like the refugee camps, and Salva's strength, both physical and psychological. Salva would not have been able to make it to the…

Ishmael Beah’s character changes throughout the story. He starts out as an innocent ten year old boy that didn’t understand much about the war or realize it would be coming to his village. He then faces his village being taken by the rebels, he is now homeless and must try to survive, making him a refugee. After all that he went through escaping the rebels and other people who wanted to cause him harm, he was captured by the Sierra Leone Military. They taught him how to fight and turned him into…

Disaster! The headlines all mention the utter destruction of the world. Their dismal outlooks on the future are often accompanied by generic solution such as; “Recycle”, “Ride a bike”, etc. The novel Ishmael by Daniel Quinn the contains the same “Disaster!” message but is accompanied by many unorthodox solutions to the problems which Quinn identifies. One problem addressed is overpopulation. Quinn leaves the solution up to the reader through a binary moral dilemma: sustain the excess population…

This book hurts. It’s not fun or comfortable to read, sometimes it’s quite painful. The pain doesn’t reside in the body. No limbs ache, no blood is shed, no bones are broken. The pain exists in the soul. Ishmael’s memoir tears the hearts of his readers in America more than his hands tore the flesh of his enemies in Sierra Leone. Despite the pain, the insights gained from reading this book are well worth making it a requirement of tenth grade English students, though parents should be…

In chapters 12-15, Ishmael stops fighting for his life and starts fighting for his country. At the age of 12, he was trained to kill everyone and spare no one. Sierra Leone’s army focused on brainwashing kids to have lethal minds so they could expand their army and win the war. This caused so many children’s lives to be ruined by seeing things that cannot be unseen. They also became addicted to many different drugs/substances. Ishmael is once again is provided with new clothes at his army base.…

#6 Child Soldiers, Should They be given Amnesty Child soldiers are a big problem in the world, and the question is that if they should be given amnesty? Child soldiers are normal children from the start, they play and do what children do, but what happens is that they are abducted or they join a rebel group or an army because they need food because their families were killed and they have nowhere else to go, or they were abducted. Child soldiers SHOULD be given amnesty because they have nowhere…

(A)People often associate having hopes and dreams with child's play; that only the young and naive would mess with something as foolish as that. (B)However, movies such as The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty, the book Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck, and the documentary following three Acholi children in Northern Uganda, War Dance prove that not only children should have hopes and dreams, but everyone. (C) There are many different reasons of why we need hopes and dreams and goals in our lives,…

The world is not perfect. People experience death, torture, and poverty. They cry for help, yet the people who are in need are children. Around the world, children are forced to kill innocent people. Children become tools of destruction not of their own will. In fact, the civil war occurring in South Sudan not only consists of battles between armed men and rebels, but the war also involves around the use of child soldiers ("Terrifying Lives of Child Soldiers [analysis]”). Child soldiers are…

In the ¨Drummer Boy of Shiloh¨ written by Ray Bradbury, a 14 year old boy named Joby is in the military and is the Drummer during the civil war. In the beginning, Joby and the soldiers are at a camp just waiting for the next day. There is going to be a battle on the next day that all of them are traumatized over. Joby is scared the most because he is the youngest and he cannot defend himself like the soldiers. He feels very insignificant. He only has a drum and drumsticks and they have guns. The…