Book description
In All Things Must Fight to Live, Bryan Mealer takes readers
on a harrowing two-thousand mile journey through Congo, where
gun-toting militia still rape and kill with impunity. Amidst burnt-out
battlefields where armies still wrestle for control, into the dark
corners of the forests, and along the high savanna, where thousands
have been slaughtered and quickly forgotten, Mealer searches for signs
that Africa's most troubled state will soon rise from ruin.
At once illuminating and startling, All Things Must Fight to
Live is a searing portrait of an emerging country facing
unimaginable upheaval and almost impossible odds, as well as an
unflinching look at the darkness that continues to exist in the hearts
of men. It is non-fiction at its finest-powerful, moving, necessary.
One has to be young and perhaps a touch mad to voluntarily travel, as
Bryan Mealer has, by foot, boat, barge, bicycle, rickety airplane, and a
train that goes off the rails, through one of the most violent places on
earth. But a sane and cautious person would not have been able to bring
back the vivid and tragic stories he has, from what is by far the
world's bloodiest-and most underreported-zone of conflict.
Bryan
Mealer was born in Odessa, TX 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 then moved to New York City and worked as an
assistant editor at Esquire magazine 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.
