Starbucks spotlights child soldiers
Starbucks is making a second book selection this February. On Feb. 15, Starbucks will be selling “A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier,†by first-time writer and Sierra Leone native Ishmael Beah. Amazon says:
“In A Long Way Gone, Beah, now in his mid-twenties, tells how, at the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels in his homeland of Sierra Leone and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By thirteen, he’d been picked up by the government army, and Beah, at heart a gentle boy, found that he was capable of truly terrible acts. This is a rare and mesmerizing account, told with real literary force and heartbreaking honesty.”
Beah, now 26, fled Sierra Leone in 1997 and a year later emigrated to the United States. He graduated from Oberlin College in 2004 and now lives in New York. “A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier,†will be published in mid-February by Farrar, Straus & Giroux and will be backed by an author tour at Starbucks stores in 10 cities. Starbucks will donate $2 to UNICEF from each sale of the $22 book, with a minimum donation of $100,000.
Starbucks selection and efforts should help to offset some of the criticism it’s been getting about it’s treatment of Ethiopian coffee bean farmers.
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