Ishmael Beah. What's Not to Like?

I won't subject y'all (y'few) ou to another book review so soon after the last ones, but merely point you toward a couple of books which you may already be aware of.

The first, A Long Way Gone, was published in 2007, which is more or less when I read it. It is a powerful and moving story about the author's life as a child soldier in Sierra Leone beginning when he was 13 years old, and his good fortune to escape after a couple of years, thanks to Unicef, and end up in the U.S.

The second book, Radiance of Tomorrow, was just published a few days ago. It is a novel that deals with Sierra Leone after the war and with the question of what makes people return and reconstruct their lives and culture. I've bought it but not yet read it.

As soon as I saw that Beah was scheduled to be on the Colbert Report, I googled him to find out what was up, and saw that his novel had just been released. I bought it immediately. Beah appears to be one of those truly remarkable and beautiful persons who we can only look at with wonder and shake our heads at his joy and hopefulness. I will buy anything he cares to write.

I wanted to attach a clip of Colbert's interview with Beah, but I'm having problems. Here at least is a link that will allow you to watch it. 

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/431966/january-08-2014/ishmael-beah

Finally, there are some people who one would just like to....oh, I don't know, use your imagination. What should be done with the anal-retentive person who wrote the following on Wikipedia?

Controversy

 The accuracy of the events and chronology presented in "A Long Way Gone" have been called into question, particularly the claim that Beah became a child soldier in 1993, rather than in 1995 as the timeline of events in Sierra Leone's civil war suggests.

Supposedly Beah's rescue by Unicef can be dated and one can work backward from then. But I would imagine that birth (and death) records would be poorly maintained in the midst of a violent civil war, and I would also think it reasonable that a teenager, whose parents had been killed years before, may have some dates confused in his memory. Who cares? As if the heart of Beah's war memoir is the chronology. Is this really a controversy?