Word: soldiers
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...behind interior walls. Seracini says his ultrasound instruments have detected gaps behind the giant mural that follow the contours of Leonardo's original work. Most intriguing of all is a detail on the existing mural: in the area presumed to be covering the Leonardo, Vasari had painted a soldier carrying a banner on which are written the only words in the enormous work: CERCA TROVA, which roughly translates as "Seek and ye shall find...
...equivalent of a rock star. (I'll eat my hat if he does not meet Bono in the next 12 months.) Beah, 26, slight and handsome with a ready but wary smile, has written a memoir, and it's a doozy. Separated from his parents at 12 when rebel soldiers attacked his Sierra Leonean village, by 13 he was a child soldier and a drug addict. By 19 he was living in the U.S., at Oberlin College, in Ohio. In February he's starting on a book tour...
...pitying account of how a gentle spirit survives a childhood from which all the innocence has suddenly been sucked out. It's a truly riveting memoir. But just as crucial to its success is its arrival at what might be called a cultural sweet spot for the African child soldier. The kid-at-arms has become a pop-cultural trope of late. He's in novels, movies, magazines and on TV, flaunting his Uzi like a giant foam hand at a baseball game. He's in the latest James Bond movie and The Last King of Scotland...
From the rehabilitation camp where he was weaned off drugs and violence (not an easy task; Beah calls the workers there "truly heroic"), the former soldier went to live with an uncle. But the civil war was not over, and his uncle died, so Beah, who had visited New York City in 1996 as a guest of the U.N., eventually was adopted by a woman he met then. He went to school and college. And now, in one of those American-dreamlike turns, he's going on a 10-city book tour sponsored by Starbucks...
...purveyor of solidly middlebrow culture to go with its joe. Beah's is the second book it has chosen to feature in its 6,000 stores. Its first was by best-selling male weepmeister Mitch Albom (he of those Tuesdays with Morrie), which suggests how far the child-soldier has moved as a phenomenon for mass consumption...