Cultured Travel Guide Books - All Things Must Fight to Live: Stories of War and Deliverance in Congo |
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List Price: $24.99
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 967.41034
EAN: 9781596913455
ISBN: 1596913452
Label: Bloomsbury USA
Manufacturer: Bloomsbury USA
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 320
Publication Date: 2008-04-29
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Release Date: 2008-04-29
Studio: Bloomsbury USA |
| Spotlight Customer Reviews: |
Customer Rating: 
Summary: A good way to learn about a distant and strange country
Comment: Highly recommended. Reading this book I learned a lot about the history of Congo and the suffering of its people. Once you started reading you can't really put it down. But be warned: The stories about gunboys, militia and so on are really cruel and reading about their atrocities makes you want to throw the book against the wall or shout at somebody.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Personal Memoir Of A Humanitarian Catastrophe
Comment: 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
Customer Rating:
Summary: Mealer delivers
Comment: I read this book in May and still find myself haunted by it. Episodes like the Kinshasa Fight Club or the surreal appearance of Jessica Lange at a triage camp will stay with me for a long long time.
Mealer tenderly renders the humanity of a situation most of us would prefer to think of as inhuman.
You owe it to yourself to take a look.
Customer Rating:
Summary: WOW!
Comment: I had to put the book down several times because I felt sick. Bryan's writing was so real that I felt every terrifying and treacherous moment along the way. Just when a dangerous jouney ended, another began. I am so overwhelmed with what Bryan experienced in the Congo. I know him personally as well as his family, and I can't imagine what they all went through at their own levels.
I applaud Bryan Mealer for the excellent portrayal of a dire situation. I admire his wife, Ann Marie, and family for living through all of the reports, emails and contacts from Bryan throughout his entire journey.
BRAVO, Bryan, for the intensity, honesty, and real depiction of the situation in the Congo that we should all be aware of and concerned about.
Customer Rating:
Summary: read this book for many reasons
Comment: I recommend this book for many reasons--Mealer's lyrical, colorful prose, insight into some of the most magnificent and heartbreaking events and places in the DRC, and finally, for a first hand account of how, why, and when news reaches us out of Africa. I'll recommend this book to my colleagues who study Congo, but also to family members who would like a window into this fiercely captivating and complicated place.
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| Editorial Reviews: |
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.
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