And Still Peace Did Not Come: A Memoir of Reconciliation

Between 2004 and 2007, Kamara-Umunna hosted Straight from the Heart, a phone-in radio program that broadcast the "true-life stories" of survivors of Liberia's civil wars (1989–1996, 1999–2003). At the show's inception, the focus was on the victims. In this part memoir and part history, Kamara-Umunna intersperses these "true-life stories" with accounts of her own childhood and experiences in war-torn Liberia. She tells the story of the Straight from the Heart Center, a refuge for child soldiers. There, former child soldiers rebuild their lives from the ashes of atrocity and forge deep bonds of friendship among themselves. "Sometimes," she reports, "I get overwhelmed," and so too will the reader. This memoir, like the recollection of "[t]ales so unspeakable it was hard to believe they had actually occurred," is an act of hope and catharsis, an answer to the unspeakable, images of boys turned automaton killers, dressed in costume "torn from women and children that they had killed," that to this day haunt the survivors of Liberia's brutal past. (Apr.)