Category Archives: book

when i first read blood river, butcher’s first book, i had resisted it’s call for a long time. my initial thought was that it was another middle class adventure book, the result of a drunken night at university, where unicycling the length of south america seems like a perfectly good idea and there’s a career in public speaking and book touring in the bag while you think up the next ‘crazy, madcap’ adventure.

having read everything i wanted to read in the house, it was almost a best of a bad bunch situation that forced me to read it. had i done some research, i’d have seen butcher’s credentials as a war correspondent and journalist and read it instantly but there you go, i judge books not only by their cover, but by my own imagined background of the author. blood river was simply excellent.

chasing the devil lacks some of the edginess and adventure i felt from the first expedition but it has an abundance of background information and research that goes much further than the walk from sierra leone to liberia itself. the links to graham greene and those stories are fascinating. the underlying, all powerful poro whose influence butcher attributes to many of the areas problems. the corruption, the harrowing war stories, the analysis of africa from the insular, personal level, all make this book much more than a simple travel journal. i liked it a lot.