Book Reviews Denov, M. (2010). Child Soldiers: Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front.

Child soldiers in Africa have received significant attention over the past decade from journalists, scholars, policy makers, donors, and development organizations working to end civil wars and rebuild countries devastated by conflict. In this popular and academic discourse, a central debate persists whether child soldiers are heinous villains or helpless and innocent victims. The popular media have alternatively portrayed child soldiers in disturbing photographs of unknown young boys grinning sardonically as they wield AK-47s or through the more sympathetic coverage of Ishmael Beah, a former child soldier from Sierra Leone who wrote a best-selling autobiography. In contrast to the dramatic and polarized treatment of child soldiers by the media, a more nuanced scholarly literature has emerged, largely from anthro-pology, psychology, and economics (Blattman and Annan, 2009; Peters & Richards, 1998), and has focused on children’s individual experiences of combat and reintegration. Myriam Denov’s insightful analysis of the memo-ries and contemporary experiences of a group of former child soldiers als