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Summary
Summary
A foreign correspondent's gripping account of his experiences in Congo, told through the long scope of the country's dark and brutal history.
After covering a brutal war that claimed four million lives, journalist Bryan Mealer takes readers on a harrowing two-thousand-mile journey through Congo, where gun-toting militia still rape and kill with impunity. Amid burned-out battlefields, the dark corners of the forests, and the high savanna, where thousands have been massacred and quickly forgotten, Mealer searches for signs that Africa's most troubled nation will soon rise from ruin.
At once illuminating and startling, All Things Must Fight to Live is a searing portrait of an emerging country devastated by a decade of war and horror and now facing almost impossible odds at recovery, as well as an unflinching look at the darkness and greed that exists in the hearts of men. It is nonfiction at its finest--powerful, moving, necessary.
Author Notes
Bryan Mealer was born in Odessa, Texas, and spent his childhood in West Texas and San Antonio. He graduated with a degree in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin, and spent time as a city reporter for the Austin Chronicle . He worked as an assistant editor at Esquire magazine in New York City before moving to Nairobi, Kenya, to become a freelance reporter. He later was the Associated Press staff correspondent in Kinshasa, Congo. He now lives in Providence, Rhode Island, and contributes to several magazines.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In 1996 the brutal civil war in Rwanda spilled into neighboring Congo, triggering a conflict that has seethed for 12 long years, claimed more lives than any since WWII and received little acknowledgment or aid from the international community. AP correspondent Mealer spent three years in this shattered land, and his book is a perceptive, empathetic, stomach-twisting presentation of the human condition during chaos. Mealer depicts war and peace as "the mighty arms of a hurricane"; war hurtles thousands of terrified people into the bush; intermittent peace lures the "lost ones" home. Individuals and institutions, indigenous and Western alike, are overwhelmed by the confluence of political collapse, economic disintegration, international indifference and a generalized military ineffectiveness that prevents resolution of the conflict on any terms. The vivid vignettes of combat and its aftermath portend a "forever war," and the author highlights the impotence of grassroots solutions that render any "deliverance" ephemeral at best. Mealer's book is a quiet paean to the courage he has witnessed, and its final salute to "the many proud people of Congo" is as much eulogy as affirmation. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Former Associated Press correspondent Mealer recalls four unnerving years in Congo. In 2003, the author was a freelance reporter in Kenya, striving to find noteworthy stories he could sell to American publications. His search was mostly in vain, until the AP's Nairobi bureau chief suggested a trip to Congo, where a fearsome clash between the Hema and Lendu tribes had just led to many hundreds of deaths. Mealer's subsequent stint in Congo forms the backbone of his potent memoir. From the moment he arrived, it was clear that the country was collapsing into chaos. The author pulls no punches in describing the sights that flickered before his eyes from his bases in Kinshasa and Bunia, or in retelling gut-wrenching stories related to him by the residents of towns decimated by violence. In Mudzipela, he talked to people who had witnessed beheadings, bodies chopped into pieces and even a man feasting on human remains. He muses on the vast differences between his own life and the lives of the Congolese, whose incredible stoicism in the face of monumental slaughter was something he never really adjusted to. Mealer occasionally returned home during his tenure, and brief passages about his life in Brooklyn provide an effective contrast. The author frequently mentions the respite both he and the locals found in music: the Congolese in Kinshasa's ever-present live performances, "brash and thumping and spilling down the street at four a.m."; the author in headphones clasped firmly over his ears at night to drive away the day's horrors. The book takes a sudden, unexpected turn in its final pages with a lengthy account of Mealer's trip aboard a rickety old train through the southern province of Katanga, a journey in search of hope and signs of rebuilding in this battle-scarred country. Gutsy, richly descriptive recollections effectively conjure grisly events in a troubled nation. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
With vivid prose and compelling emotion, Mealer chronicles the four years he spent covering the fighting and genocide in Congo. In 1996, when fighting in Rwanda spilled into Congo, Mealer came to the troubled nation as a freelance writer with little knowledge of ethnic loyalties, looking for a translator to help him navigate the complexities of conflict. He went on to become Associated Press staff correspondent and recalls the inanity of the fighting, with rebels used as proxies to fight wars that had more to do with looting natural resources than settling ethnic disputes. Mealer offers historic background and vivid descriptions of crumbling postcolonial towns, cowboy journalists, crowded marketplaces, and blue-and-white Potemkin villages of UN peacekeepers. He recalls the feared Cobra commander of boy soldiers who held sway by the belief in magic, and the soldiers, dressed in wigs and prom gowns, committing unbelievable atrocities. He also reports his own creeping emotional atrophy as he is repulsed and then spellbound by the violence and by the courageous people who struggled to make sense of the fighting.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2008 Booklist
Table of Contents
Map | p. xi |
Introduction | p. xiii |
Chapter 1 In the Valley of the Gun | p. 1 |
Chapter 2 Daily Blood | p. 49 |
Chapter 3 Waiting for Cobra | p. 96 |
Chapter 4 The River Is a Road | p. 151 |
Chapter 5 "Un Petit Deraillement" | p. 220 |
Epilogue | p. 293 |
Acknowledgments | p. 297 |
A Note on Sources | p. 299 |