Child Soldier is Featured Skeptics Speaker

Ishmael Beah, author of A Long Way Gone: Memoir of a Child Soldier, was the featured Society of Skeptics speaker on Monday, October 13. Ishmael spent the day on campus, speaking with students and faculty and joining them for formal dinner before speaking that evening. According to Ishmael’s Web site, his book is “a gripping story of a child’s journey through hell and back.”

The Web site adds, “There may be as many as 300,000 child soldiers, hopped-up on drugs and wielding AK-47s, in more than 50 conflicts around the world. Ishmael Beah used to be one of them. He is one of the first to tell his story in his own words…At the age of 12, he fled attacking rebels and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By 13, 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. Eventually released by the army and sent to a UNICEF rehabilitation center, he struggled to regain his humanity and to reenter the world of civilians, who viewed him with fear and suspicion.”

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A full listing of the Skeptics programs is available here.

Updated 10/16/08

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