![]() ![]() five years after you bought him a beer in a bar). Butcher’s a great cadger relying on the semi-extorted kindness of strangers (the sort of Brit who shows up at your door at 2 a.m. He travels by motorbike, aid-agency vehicle, UN patrol boat and dug-out canoe. Livingstone, I presume?”), heading off with a backpack, laptop, cell phone, stash of cash and a dubious list of contacts. The author retraces the route of the 19th-century journalist and explorer, Henry Morton Stanley (“Dr. Yet the book remains well worth the reader’s money and time, since popular works on Congo are so few and the country’s post-colonial tragedy may be the saddest of all the sorrowful tales to emerge from the world’s most disappointing continent. He is indisputably brave, admirably intrepid and a hopeless whiner with whom I’d hate to be trapped in a back-country hotel.įor Butcher, each next situation is bound to be the most-dreadful, awful, terrible, dangerous experience in human history – except that it isn’t and he gets on just fine. Tim Butcher, a war correspondent for The Daily Telegraph, spent 44 days descending the Congo River in Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” where the torments have only worsened since the fictional Kurtz cried out, “The horror, the horror.” The author risked his life to report on current conditions in the wretched African country once known as Zaire. ![]() ![]() “Blood River” is a good book on a grim subject by a dull man. ![]()
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