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

     My partner and I are almost finished reading A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah. In the book, the author tells us about his hellish nightmare that is the Sierra Leonese Civil War in the 1990's. We follow him as he criss-crosses the country, attempts to survive and eventually join the ranks of the army, where as a child soldier, he kills several people, does drugs including marijuana and "brown-brown, cocaine mixed with gunpowder" and becomes just as bad as the rebels he hated.

A Sierra Leonese Child Soldier, holding an AK-47, the weapon the Ishmael used during the war.

    

One of the central ideas of the book is the brutal violence these people endured. Ishmael tell the reader how the rebels would initiate new recruits into their ranks. He writes "They had carved their initials RUF (Revolutionary United Front), on his body with a hot bayonet and chopped of all of his fingers with the exception of his thumbs." For years, the public has been exposed to violence in the form of film and television. One such example of this violence are films directed by Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino has directed critically acclaimed films such as Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill: Volumes 1&2 and most recently Django Unchained. But all of these films have one thing in common, a very large amount of violence. In an interview, Tarantino said "I work in crime films and martial arts movies, I guess there's gonna be a fight or two. "http://www.miramax.com/subscript/quentin-tarantino-violence-in-films/ 

 So what we have here is contradictory sentiments. We have Ishmael, who believes that we already have enough violence in the world, and we have Tarantino, who believes it's alright to put graphic violence in his films. Now, I personally enjoy Tarantino's films, and there is lots of graphic violence in them, but it's just a film, and only people who can handle such violence should watch the movies, same as with "A Long Way Gone".