Boy soldier under fire

Ishmael Beah appears to have joined the club of writers who have got rich on memoirs of victimhood and wickedness, only to be found out.

His book A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier has sold 650,000 copies in the US and has been awarded the commercial honour of being sold in Starbucks. He has become the darling of the talk show circuit and is an ambassador for Unicef, the UN agency which rescued him.

Beah, 27, tells a story of being forced into the ranks of child soldiers in Sierra Leone's civil war in the 1990s. A Long Way Gone describes how he was taken to the extremes of human savagery by drugs and terror. These were the kids who cut their victims' hands off and