Pop Culture Finds Lost Boys

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Beah escaped this fate and thrived, he says, through pure luck. But he's one of those very quick studies who could have succeeded anywhere. He learned to kill fast, and he learned how to blend in at an American high school fast. Even in Paris, he looks as relaxed as any tourist. Of course, what he did and endured has long contrails. His migraines have gone, but the faces of people on the street will sometimes remind him of people he killed and of the very bad days of his youth. It's not what he did, though, that most disgusts him. It's what he was. "The thing that causes me to wince most is when I remember all the really bad stuff we did that I laughed at," he says. "You wonder how anyone with a soul could do that."

Now that the celebrity-entertainment complex has its huge eyeball trained on the issue of child soldiers, the danger is that they will become trivialized--cheap, ubiquitous images, dropped in like clip art for a hit of emotion and danger. But with a memoir as vivid as Beah's, the clear-eyed tale of a child determinedly pursuing his own humanity against all odds, the spotlight may yet produce more than just titillation.