Ryan Topper

Ryan Topper is a PhD candidate in the School of English at the University of Leeds, where he studies postcolonial literature and critical theory. He is currently writing a dissertation on the relations between trauma and spirit possession in psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and African literature.

Writing on Public Books

Reviews

Can Child Soldiers Be Saved?

Everybody loves stories about child soldiers, it seems, as long as redemption is involved. A memoir about Sierra Leone’s civil war, for example, is not exactly the feel-good stuff you’d expect to see at a Starbucks counter. But in 2007 Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, one of the first […]