Everybody Reads Blog

A blog reader brought my attention to this article published Sunday in The Observer that states that certain details in A Long Way Gone may be inaccurate.

Following the article, initial article, another article was published in The Australian on Monday. 

According to this article:

[Beah's] Creative writing professor Dan Chaon said if errors did exist in the autobiography, they should be put down to poetic licence, saying that during the two years he and Beah worked on the book, its factual integrity was never discussed...

"I was completely amazed that an undergraduate could write as well as he could and was completely astonished by a lot of his sentences and his metaphors and, yeah, by the vividness of his memory. During the period of our writing the book, I did not discuss the factual integrity of the book with him. I didn't have any questions about the accuracy of the content. I was acting as a writing teacher.

"I guess as I was reading it, I was so convinced by the detail that I never felt as if there was any question that this was something he understood and knew.

"If there are factual discrepancies, I don't know. But it wasn't as if, during the writing of this book, that Ishmael imagined in his wildest dreams that he was writing a bestseller that would appear all over the world.

"He was writing it as a creative writing project. He was writing it for himself ... with really no sense that it would be published."

 Subsequently, Beah issued a response to the news articles on Tuesday.

"I was right about my family. I am right about my story. This is not something one gets wrong. The Australian's reporters have been calling my college professors, asking if I 'embellished' my story. They published my adoptive mother's address, so she now receives ugly threats. They have used innuendo against me when there is no fact. Though apparently, they believe anything they are told—unless it comes from me or supports my account. Sad to say, my story is all true."  The full response can be found here.

What do you think? Do the discrepancies in his book invalidate, or at least detract, from the tragedy of Beah’s experience as a child soldier? Or do you believe that factuality and accuracy should be the top priority for any non-fiction book which aims to educate the public?

As this story was just published, I am interested to see what other ripples this article will cause in Ishmael Beah's waters.