#71 in Biography & memoir
A Long Way Gone
- 240
- Pages
- about 4.5 h
- Reading time
- NYT bestseller · 0 weeks on the list
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Our view
In “A Long Way Gone”, Ishmael Beah recounts his years as a child soldier in Sierra Leone so directly that the book is hard to put down. The memoir follows a boy from innocence into war, and then the courage it took to heal and leave. Some readers find the content hard to bear in places. There are journalists and historians who question whether all of the account matches the historical record.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier is a 2007 memoir written by Ishmael Beah, an author from Sierra Leone. The book is a firsthand account of Beah's time as a child soldier during the Sierra Leone Civil War in the 1990s. The book describes the change from Beah being an innocent child to being corrupted by war and its effects. The book received positive reception and won several awards. However, some news outlets and historians have claimed parts of the novel do not correlate with historical events and could be inaccurate.
Where the score comes from
The sources average 8.0 across 270 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 65% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Biography & memoir average of 8.1. That is how 8.1 comes out.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 8.2 | 37 | 14% |
| Google Books | 8.0 | 99 | 37% |
| Hardcover | 8.0 | 134 | 50% |
Frequently asked
How long is A Long Way Gone?
It has 240 pages — shorter than 76% of the ranked books in Biography & memoir.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Biography & memoir — with scores between 8.0 and 8.1, closest to this book.
