It's been a long time since I've posted here. I spend a bit of time on Twitter and Facebook now, and since I don't feel like i have a whole lot to say, those tend to be a better forum for what I do say, if that makes sense.
Right now I'm reading Chasing the Devil: On Foot through Africa's Killing Fields by Tim Butcher. In 2009 I read another book by Tim Butcher: Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart, which was a fantastic book. Here's the cover blurb from Blood River:
When "Daily Telegraph" correspondent Tim Butcher was sent to cover Africa in 2000 he quickly became obsessed with the idea of recreating H. M. Stanley's famous expedition – but travelling alone. Despite warnings that his plan was 'suicidal', Butcher set out for the Congo's eastern border with just a rucksack and a few thousand dollars hidden in his boots. Making his way in an assortment of vessels including a motorbike and a dugout canoe, helped along by a cast of characters from UN aid workers to a campaigning pygmy, he followed in the footsteps of the great Victorian adventurers. Butcher's journey was a remarkable feat, but the story of the Congo, told expertly and vividly in this book, is more remarkable still.
When I heard Tim Butcher had written another book (Chasing the Devil), I couldn't wait to read it. As with Blood River, the author has followed in a famous man's footsteps, this time Graham Greene, who with his cousin Barbara undertook a 350-mile journey by train, by foot, and by boat across Sierra Leone and Liberia. Greene's book about this experience, called Journey Without Maps, was published in 1936. Mr. Butcher re-created this journey in 2009, some 75 years after Greene, and only a few years after the end of Liberia's brutal civil wars–which Mr. Butcher viewed firsthand as a correspondent for the Telegraph.
Because so much of Chasing the Devil is about the paradoxes of an Africa that is both changed and unchanged since Greene's visit, I decided to read Journey without Maps as well.
Next up: The Fear: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe, by Peter Godwin, who also wrote Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa and When A Crocodile Eats the Sun.
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