Ishmael Beah ’04 has become “the literary-humanitarian equivalent of a rock star,” wrote Belinda Luscombe in Time on February 2. Luscombe is one of a horde of journalists raving about Beah and his memoir, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, which debuts at No. 2 on the New York Times Best Seller List this Sunday, March 4.

Beah’s book prompted a cover story in the New York Times Magazine (“The Making, and Unmaking, of a Child Soldier,” January 14), as well as attention from such publications as the Washington Post, USA Today, and Entertainment Weekly, to name a few. The 26-year-old author has appeared on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross.

Beah’s memoir is also the second book selected to be sold at Starbucks, which is sponsoring an 11-city author tour that began February 16. 

A Long Way Gone recounts the horrors of the Sierra Leone civil war in which Beah became a child soldier who was trained to kill or be killed. Beah lost his family and became swept up in the war at age 12. Fueled by drugs, he spent several years committing acts of violence before his commander released him to UNICEF workers, who rehabilitated him.

Time called the book “a breathtaking and unselfpitying account of how a gentle spirit survives a childhood from which all innocence has suddenly been sucked out.” Newsweek.com reads, “Beah is a gifted writer … Read his memoir and you will be haunted.”

The young author attributes much of his success to Oberlin, where creative writing professors Dan Chaon and Laurie McMillan encouraged him to write. “[Chaon] pushed me to finish, and before I finished college I had a draft of [the book],” Beah said in an Entertainment Weekly interview appearing on February 15.

“This is a book that has real significance in the larger world,” says Chaon, who worked with Beah for two years. “Students can look at this and say, ‘Wow, writing can make a difference.’”

Beah took Basic Writing with McMillin during his first semester at Oberlin and says that she and his classmates offered encouraging responses after he wrote about his childhood. “It was an important moment for him, to realize that his writing meant something to other people,” says McMillin, who once wrote about Beah’s work, calling it “blow-your-hat-off-good, gutsy and vivid.”

Many students dream about writing a book during college, the way Beah did. According to Chaon, those opportunities exist at Oberlin “if students have the desire and willingness to work as hard as Ishmael did.”