All Things Must Fight to Live: Stories of War and Deliverance in Congo [Hardcover]

Bryan Mealer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 29, 2008

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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)
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From Booklist

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. --Vanessa Bush

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA; First Edition edition (April 29, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1596913452
• ISBN-13: 978-1596913455
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,051,870 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Bryan Mealer is the author of "All Things Must Fight to Live," which details his experience reporting the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo from 2003-2007 for the Associated Press and Harper's magazine. He's also co-author of "The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind" with William Kamkwamba.

In 2003, Mealer left his job as an assistant editor at Esquire to become a freelance correspondent in Nairobi, Kenya. He sold his first story to the Chicago Tribune about a massacre in the hills of northeastern Congo, one of the many flashpoints in a war that's killed over 5 million people. After serving as AP's staff correspondent based in the capital Kinshasa, Mealer traveled the vast country by barge, bicycle, train, and foot, to chronicle the conflict's lasting devastation. He later returned home to his wife, playwright Ann Marie Healy, and began writing his book. Upon its release in 2008, TIME Magazine wrote: "With the maturity and talent he displays in this book, Mealer...has already set a new standard by which all correspondents might approach other forgotten wars."

In 2008, he also began working with Kamkwamba, a 20-year-old inventor in Malawi, who, after dropping out of high school due to a crippling famine, began building windmills from tree branches, tractor and bicycle parts to bring electricity and irrigation to his village. The book will be released by William Morrow in September 2009.

Mealer was born in Odessa, Texas and graduated from the University of Texas at Austin. He now lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Eye-Opening, June 16, 2008

By 

Christopher Berend (NYC) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: All Things Must Fight to Live: Stories of War and Deliverance in Congo (Hardcover)

Bryan Mealer brought to life a place that, sadly, most of us know little or care even less about. He takes far off characters in a far off war and gives them an easy familiarity. This book is not for the faint of heart--the war in Congo has killed millions through combat and disease, and Mealer does not shy away from its most brutal details. And yet, he does not revel in them either, as so many war correspondents haphazardly do. He simply writes what he sees. And what he sees is pretty amazing stuff. Highly recommended.

43 of 53 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars An incomplete, biased and unexamined account, November 29, 2008

By 

Katherine C. Garrett (Philadelphia, PA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: All Things Must Fight to Live: Stories of War and Deliverance in Congo (Hardcover)

Bryan Mealer has attempted to do the impossible: represent the suffering of a nation in the midst of war and for that I give him credit. However, as a White, Ameican middle class woman who lived in Eastern Congo in 2005-06, I find much of his book to be deeply problematic. This is not a historic account of the war; nor is it an attmept to unpack and examine the myriad factors that instigated the conflict and continue to cause unrest even now; rather, it seems to be one man's biased and often aggrandized account of his willingness to "risk his life" to bring us a litany of disconnected stories from "the heart of darkness." As a book, it is little more than a re-construction of Europeans as noble and technologcally-advanced and Congolese as savage and backward. This is an extremely dangerous myth to perpetuate via mainstream American media, a medium already saturated in representations of Africans as starving, disease-ridden and hopelessly corrupt. While the horror of the war is certainly a reality, Mealer ignores the complex political underpinnings which, if exposed in depth, would serve as a scathing indictment of countless Western governments, including our own. Gerard Prunier's seminal text on the Rwandan genocide is an example of what good war reporting can be. This book, on the other hand,is a sad reminder that the war in Congo DOES deserve press coverage. Just not the kind delivered here.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Personal Memoir Of A Humanitarian Catastrophe, July 26, 2008

By 

David Donelson "Author of The Dynamic Manager... - See all my reviews
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This review is from: All Things Must Fight to Live: Stories of War and Deliverance in Congo (Hardcover)

Bryan Mealer has penned a brutal memoir of his three years as a reporter in the Congo, three years when teenage gunboys roamed the countryside and city streets, when UN peacekeeping forces faced mystical leaders operating from jungle mountaintops, when rebel militias and government forces alike pillaged their own nation. It was a horrible time in the history of a country that has seen little else for the last hundred years.

While Mealer writes about the bloody atrocities he witnessed, the real story he tells is about himself. He's drawn back to the Congo three times, apparently addicted to the extreme discomfort and random violence he endures. His travels cover nearly the entire country from the capital of Kinshasa to the mineral-rich southern provinces to the guerilla-infested eastern region where an alphabet-soup of militias, foreign armies, and UN forces fight a never-ending war of terror, rape, and mutilation. He rides a newly-reconstructed rail line and even follows Conrad's trail up the Congo River via barge. At one point, he and his adventure-junkie buddies take off through the jungle on bicycles.

While Mealer tells us the names and stories of many Congolese he meets along the way, he never really gives much insight into them as anything other than victims. He says as much when he reflects on his bicycle journey:

"...once in the jungle, my own basic needs and level of comfort had stood in the way of learning anything. I didn't even know my riders' last names or anything about their families. I'd simply been too exhausted and hungry to care. It wasn't my proudest moment, and even now, those last days on the trail leave a sting of regret."

Still, All Things Must Fight To Live puts the reader close to the action and accurately reflects the aftermath of war and colonialism in one of the world's greatest humanitarian catastrophes.

Dave Donelson, author of Heart of Diamonds: A Novel of Scandal, Love and Death in the Congo