Soldiers of Light by Daniel Bergner

Soldiers of Light Reviews

• 
  Matt

  This is one of the most moving books I've ever read, told in the form of stories by people --children soldiers, those maimed in war, young girls, priests and nuns-- who witnessed unspeakable horrors of the warfare in Sierra Leone. With no support and through sheer determination, the human spirit somehow survived and regained force, even as they could never reconcile the wounds of war, the vast emotions of loss or outrun the haunting memory of the events that defined them.
  
  A fragment of Bergner's intense, evocative writing style, from p. 184:
  
  I used to feel a sense of--eternity....She didn't mention beauty, but I hear it: the graceful curve of a vine bridge sweeping low above a river; the cotton trees with their giant buttresses, chambers of unearthly embrace; the path that bent with elusive promise amid the heartbreaking green. I knew something of what she was trying to evoke, I had experienced, here and there, in Sierra Leone and other countries, a small version of it: the transcendent feeling in an impossibly remote place, the place of splendor and devastation where people were acutely aware of the size of the unknown and where every voice, every song, every drumbeat, every simple act seemed to carry with it, in the immediate background, a ... comforting hint of God.
• 
  Jack

  A well written account of the troubles facing Africa. With a balanced narrative on the western worlds influence.