1. Kameron Boleware
Laura Brasie
October 27 2014
UK 101
A Long Way Gone is an outstanding book that has to do a lot with family.
Throughout the book Ishmael Beah belongs to several different families that he becomes
a part of like, his nature that he was born into, then after that his family becomes the
group of boys that tries to find a way to survive day after day, after meeting the
lieutenant, the army becomes his family and then when he is rescued he learns to be a
part of a whole new family. Ishmael had a young life that was devastating, stressful and
unstable and with the experiences that he went through Ishmael had to adapt to different
people, and a different environment in order to survive. With that being said, survival,
hope and war is harsh are different themes that I got from A Long Way Gone that relates
and differs from my family history.
In the book Ishmael has to fight day to day in order to stay alive, he does whatever
it takes to survive. There are times where Ishmael has to steal food in order to eat and
there are times when he has to use resources from the environment in order to maintain
his health. He joins with the army and there he is able to eat and he is also being
protected by things that can kill him. Ishmael is also a great soldier and becomes addicted

2. to drugs which allows him to keep fighting and allows him not to become emotional
during the hard times in war. All of these are examples of survival and I feel like I can
relate this to times where my family and I had to survive because when I was younger we
wasn’t the wealthiest family around and my mother was young, so she had to make
sacrifices and work extra hard in order for my sisters and I could eat, and have shelter to
survival hard times in my childhood.
In my family history most of my family comes from down south in states such as
Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee and in those states I’ve had family that were slaves a
while back and wanted to be free, so they kept faith in their lives and hoped one day to be
free. This part of my family history relates to Ishmael and how his father’s words stuck
with him, when he was lost in the damage that war brings you and was giving up on life.
It compares with my family history because just like the slaves wanted to be free and kept
faith, Ishmael father’s words reminded him about the brighter days that he hoped would
come sooner or later. That hope came for both my family history and Ishmael because the
hope of the slaves in my family history being free came, which results of me being free
and the hope of brighter days for Ishmael came when the UNICEF found him and took
him to a rehabilitation center for help, which potentially leads him to coming to New
York, where he meets his future foster mom.
The last theme that I got from the book a long Way Gone is war is harsh. This is a
theme in the book that I have no relationship with because it turned Ishmael into
something he never though he would be, a killing machine. War also turned Ishmael into

3. a drug user and it brainwashed him making him believe that killing all of the rebels is like
revenge for what they did to his family. The way this differs from my family history is
by, I really have not had any experiences with war or anything in my family history. The
constant violence that you see in war damaged Ishmael so much that it was hard for him
to become or act normal again because he was so far gone into being a soldier that when
he went to rehab he struggled to image what the future would bring him. The only thing
that helped Ishmael in rehab was the relationship that he had built with the nurse in the
rehab center Esther.
Survival, hope and the damage of war are all themes that are displayed in the book
a long way gone, Ishmael Beah went through all of these and it changed his life
drastically. How he survived this horror, kept hope throughout this horror and what this
did to him all relates and differs from experiences I have had with my family and my
family history. Ishmael experiences that he had with his families was just harsher and
way more tragic then the experiences I have had with my family. With that being said the
only way that Ishmael got through this was because of the different families he had, and
the love and care individuals showed him.