Where is the access road?

So on the ride home I was thinking more about an access road INTO the book "A Long Way Gone." Now, granted, if this memoir was written when he was 50 it would be a very different book than it is today - probably started when he was 25... or younger considering the loft he moved into was that of a professional storyteller.

The thing I'm missing most is accessibility to his situation. While I have never done the things he has done I have used many of the same psychological triggers he has used. I only have my own experience to draw on to relate to him and the place that where it could happen are these moments that aren't given time. (Either by his own narrative or the editing.) I've used storytelling as a safety device, I've been triggered in times of stress to employ survival techniques and skills and I understand the pleasure I get from those devices. We never see implicitly that he uses his skills to further himself. He is a good looking, friendly faced and intelligent young man. This is a marketable skill for both Ishmael to use to get out and for the people looking to use him as a poster boy. He *knows* this... he's a performer and he's intelligent. He knows how to work a crowd, how to manipulate a crowd ... yet we aren't shown this side of him in the story. At the end of the day he GOT something for what he did. Not brown brown here people... pleasure, enjoyment and revenge. He continued the killing not only because he "had to" (brianwashing?) because he also got a psychological "gimmie" from the deal. And the thing is - THAT'S OK. It's part of understanding why you do the things you do. If we've already forgiven him for the atrocities of war - why can't we give him pardon for being human?

I get that this is something that is sort of "well if the book was this" instead of what the book IS... but I put my finger on why this book rang hollow for me. The person isn't real even though this is a real person. The book suffers from being too much too soon. For Ishmael's story to have full and lasting effect outside of this tragedy I feel like he needs to re-visit it in another 25 years.

Suggested: The Lucifer Effect

Hi y'all,

I would like to put up The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo, as an interesting book to follow Beah. He is the Stanford professor who did the famed Prison Guard psych experiments in the 70's. It's about understanding how good people do evil. How genocides, Abu Ghraib, and the like happen. I really wish I could be there discussing this book with you guys tonight, but if I was I would want to ask how humans are capable of arming children, or killing their neighbor with a machete... This book supposedly sheds some light on this issue. I would also volunteer my services to do a book report on this one and report back to the monkey shooters ;)

_ray

Suggested: The Road

The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a bleak (yet at times beautiful) story of a father and son, travelling across the burned out husk of a nightmarish, post-acpocalyptic America. Much like A Long Way Gone, this is a "road" book in which the main characters journey thru a hostile environment where death is always just behind them—or waiting just ahead—while at the same time, lurking within their own hearts, waiting for them to stumble or miss a step along their equally mortal inner journies. That may make no sense, but what I'm trying to say is that the two books make quite a powerful pairing and share many similar themes. They both illustrate the depths to which man may sink and the atrocities which he may visit upon his brothers and himself. And yet, they both illustrate the strength of man's humanity and his ability to overcome violence, despair, fear, loss, and death. They illustrate the ability to overcome one's own shortcomings as well as those shortcomings which have seemingly plagued man as a whole, since the beginning of recorded history. The Road may herald the end of human history as we know it. But, in that end, it creates something worth recording and remembering.

As you may be able to tell, I've already read the book, as well as one more by the same author, Blood Meridian. If you don't read if for the book club, I highly recommend reading it for yourself and would love to hear your comments on it. Follow it up by watching Children of Men for a contemporary cross-over of intense, visceral storytelling involving more of the same themes.

BTW, The Road was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction this year. You can read an article about the author from the New Yorker here.

Suggested: Watchmen

While inhabiting the same territory as Orwell's 1984, Gilliam's Brazil, and a number of lesser bleak views of a (then future) society, Watchmen takes full advantage of the graphic novel format to flesh out its characters and plots in ways rarely seen in any medium. Even after 20 years, still probably the best graphic novel out there.

Suggested: Uncommon Carriers

You might know John McPhee from his articles in the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and other publications. This is his latest, about various forms of commercial transportation, both ubiquitous and unique. I find his writing to be fascinating - creating interest in, and exposing hidden facets of, seemingly pedestrian objects and processes.

Suggested: The Wild Trees

Did a double-take when I saw the author of this was already linked in the sidebar.

Read a review of this recently, and it seems fascinating and of both local and global interest.

Joe

the shootlist

please submit your suggestions to the shootlist for upcoming books.

add a post to the blog with your suggestion(s), with a brief description of the book and why you suggest it (if you like). make sure to add "shootlist" to the label of your post for sorting. i'll add the submitted titles to the shootlist in the sidebar for voting.

group discussion #1

book:
a long way gone: memoirs of a boy soldier, by ishmael beah.

date & location:
monday, april 30th @ 8pm. location: lo's house.

• reading guide
• excerpt
• web site

from the book flap:

In A LONG WAY GONE: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, Beah, now twenty-six years old, tells a powerfully gripping story: At the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By thirteen, he’d been picked up by the government army, and Beah, at heart a gentle boy, found that he was capable of truly terrible acts. At sixteen, he was removed from fighting by UNICEF, and through the help of the staff at his rehabilitation center, he learned how to forgive himself, to regain his humanity, and, finally, to heal.

This is an extraordinary and mesmerizing account, told with real literary force and heartbreaking honesty.

about the author:

Ishmael Beah was born in Sierra Leone in 1980. He moved to the United States in 1998 and finished his last two years of high school at the United Nations International School in New York. In 2004 he graduated from Oberlin College with a B.A. in political science. He is a member of the Human Rights Watch Children’s Rights Division Advisory Committee and has spoken before the United Nations, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Center for Emerging Threats and Opportunities (CETO) at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory, and many other NGO panels on children affected by the war. His work has appeared in VespertinePress and LIT magazine. He lives in New York City.