War & Conflict Memoir

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A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

By Ishmael Beah

Ishmael Beah's memoir follows him from a boyhood of music, school and village life in Sierra Leone into the civil war that overtook the country in the 1990s. Separated from his family, he drifts from town to town as a young refugee. He is then absorbed into the government army as a young adolescent and becomes both a perpetrator and a casualty of the violence. The later chapters trace his difficult rehabilitation at a UNICEF-supported centre in Freetown and his eventual move to the United States. Told in plain, controlled prose, it is one of the best-known memoirs to read on child soldiering. It has also drawn public scrutiny over how precisely it dates some events.

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Persepolis

The Story of a Childhood

By Marjane Satrapi , Mattias Ripa , Blake Ferris

Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood is the first English-language volume of Marjane Satrapi's graphic memoir about growing up in Tehran. Told in stark black-and-white panels, it follows Marji from age six to fourteen while the Shah's monarchy collapses, the Islamic Republic tightens its grip, and war with Iraq changes daily life. Because Satrapi grew up in a secular, politically engaged family, history arrives as kitchen-table argument, family loss and a child's shifting questions about God, class and justice. Comedy and grief share the same page, and the child's viewpoint keeps vast political events personal. For anyone collecting memoirs to read about revolution, repression and coming of age, it is a compact, approachable starting point.

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