lyzadanger’s review: “I finished this nigh a week ago but I’m still challenged to say exactly how I feel about it.Reading this book is like getting off a bus and finding yourself in a third-world country where you not only don’t speak the language, but you don’t even understand the brand of humanity exercised around you. It’s a whirling confusion of sweetness paired with inhuman destructiveness. From my admittedly sheltered perspective, the leap of understanding required to conceive of how anyone could behave this way, playing fast and loose with human life in such an elementally evil way, is difficult to grasp. But I suppose that is the point.

All that said, I find that I like Beah. Anyone who can start sensitive, devolve into the Heart of Darkness and somehow come back again is a deep character in my book.

Watch out reading this if you, like me, are sensitive to graphic imagery. There were times when I had to force myself to keep reading, assuring myself that I *needed* to know about this, to understand this chaos. I found it difficult to read at night or when I was feeing tense.”

Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2007), Hardcover, 240 pages

**** (of 5)
, Read for Book Club

Tags: 50 book challenge, africa, autobiography, bookclub, memoir, nonfiction, read, readin2007, sierra leone, war