A Long Way Gone By Ishmael Beah

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In the memoir A Long Way Gone, by Ishmael Beah, Beah writes about his childhood to teen years being an unwilling child soldier in Sierra Leone and living through times of great tragedy and war. Ishmael was born in Sierra Leone in 1980 and he moved to the United States in 1998 where he finished high school at the United Nations International School in New York. Ishmael went to Oberlin College. He is also a member of the Human Rights Watch Children’s Watch Rights Division Advisory Committee. He has spoken in front of the United Nations, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Center for Emerging Threats and Opportunities (CETO), and many other NGO panels on how children are affected by war. Beah is the head of the Ishmael Beah Foundation, this …show more content…

This memoir was written to anyone who can truly handle sadness, misery, and people who wanted to be educated about other cultures. Also, the purpose of this memoir was to educate people about the troubled childhood and teen years that he went through, but also to educate people on how war and great tragedy really affects children as well. Before reading this book, I had never heard or seen anything about the war in Sierra Leone and I think that was one of the biggest motivators for Ishmael Beah because he realized that not very many people knew there was a war and he wanted to inform more people about what really went on. Ishmael uses a lot of persuasive techniques like kairos, ethos, logos, and pathos to be able to educate people on …show more content…

This creates a sense of credibility to persuade the audience through his early life experiences. Ethos is used a lot throughout the book because this is his life experiences and his early childhood. Ishmael Beah uses the word, “I,”a lot throughout the book since all of this is coming from him and not anyone else. Right off the bat we can see, “The only wars I knew were of those that I had read about in books or seen in movies such as Rambo: First Blood, and the one in neighboring Liberia that I had heard on the BBC news,” (Beah 1). Since this book is written from a first person perspective it really helps out ethos because all of this information is coming straight from the source. There is not a more credible source to listen to on this because no one else has experienced exactly what Ishmael has experienced in his own

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