How much loss can a human being suffer?

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
Ishmael Beah

It is amazingly impossible that a boy's memory can have so much stuff in it.  For certain periods in his life, he relates day-by-day, hour-by-hour narratives that are mind-bogglingly detailed, down to the taste and feel and smell of the scenes unfolding.  They are so real and in our faces that it seems more of a movie than words spoken in my ears.

I listened to the audiobook, read by Ishmael Beah himself; in this case, I think that was the best choice.  Since my discovery of audiobooks a few years ago, I've heard only a few that would have been better on paper.  My theory is that most books of fact and history are better read than heard. When I'm reading history, I often want to flip back a chapter or two and review something that was skimmed or failed to stick.  But memoirs and fiction, with a good reader (they call them "performers"), have an extra kick when heard rather than read.  It could be simply that it forces me to slow down and savor.

Ishmael Beah tells of a life destroyed by war that I don't even understand as war.  What is a war that means random killing of civilians, women and children, farmers, old men, babies?  What he described was more pointless than a genocide.  The only thing distinguishing a rebel from a soldier was the color of the cloth bound around his head.  Rebels and soldiers alike recruited from the captured boys and young men--it wasn't a race war, a land war, a religious war--it seemed to have been started by rebels from neighboring Liberia, attempting to obtain a base and armies to attack into Liberia.  Once started, the Sierra Leone RUF (rebels) went on to gain more and more territory, with poorly stated goals of redistribution of wealth and power to the people.  But all they seemed to do was to make the people fear and suffer and starve. 

The United Nations peacekeeping forces eventually ended the fighting.  For now.

The book's unbelievable pain is relieved by scenes of impossible kindness.  The boys look after each other, but they are helped along their many journeys by random individuals who step outside of their fear and give them food, shelter, medicine and hope.  It is the most depressing and the most uplifting book I have found in years.