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Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart | 
 enlarge | Author: Tim Butcher
Publisher: Grove Press
Category: Book
List Price: $25.00
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Rating:  10 reviews
Sales Rank: 5036
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 384
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.3 x 1.3
ISBN: 0802118771
Dewey Decimal Number: 916.7510434
EAN: 9780802118776
ASIN: 0802118771
Publication Date: October 1, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand New. 100% money back guarantee. All books shipped from Strand Bookstore, New York City, USA.
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Product Description
Published to rave reviews in the United Kingdom and named a Richard & Judy Book Club selection—the only work of nonfiction on the 2008 list—Blood River is the harrowing and audacious story of Tim Butcher's journey in the Congo and his retracing of renowned explorer H. M. Stanley's famous 1874 expedition in which he mapped the Congo River. When Daily Telegraph correspondent Tim Butcher was sent to Africa in 2000 he quickly became obsessed with the legendary Congo River and the idea of re-creating Stanley's legendary journey along the three-thousand-mile waterway. 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 vehicles, including a motorbike and a dugout canoe, helped along by a cast of characters from UN aid workers to a pygmy-rights advocate, he followed in the footsteps of the great Victorian adventurers. An utterly absorbing narrative that chronicles Tim Butcher's forty-four-day journey along the Congo River, Blood River is an unforgettable story of exploration and survival.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 5 more reviews...
 Disappointed December 1, 2008
The author's premise is intriguing. A lone white man will journey through the horrific darkness of the modern Congo, tracing the steps of Henry Stanley's legendary trek recorded in 1876.
Mr. Butcher's account however falls flat with a resounding thud.
The descriptions of his journey are wooden, unedifying, and whiny. "I got bitten this morning by a mosquito!" "I became hungry after noon having gone without breakfast!"
The author bails out half-way through his mission and finishes the last 1,000 mile leg of his quest to the Atlantic virtually non-stop by freighter and helicopter, (hint: first 300 pages describe about 1,000 miles: last 20 pages describe the next 1,000 miles).
It seems that the author became bored with his own tale and journey.
Prospective readers hoping for new insights into central Africa may enjoy about twelve pages of this book. I would advise others to avoid the seductive promise of adventure here.
A Journey - Not a History November 29, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
November 2008, Kindle Version
Positives: The journey he takes is difficult and the people he meets live in extraordinary conditions. Through it all I felt I was traveling right next to the author. At the end of the book I didn't sense I read a story but had memories.
Deltas: I agree with R.M. Peterson's point #2 (see his previous review) that the writing was a bit ordinary. To me - minor irritation.
Overall: A book I am pleased to have read, especially considering the current events (Fall 2008) in the Congo.
 incredible read November 24, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Wow!! This was a moving and incredible read that weaves history and current events in a tumultuous part of the world. I'd been looking for a book that tackled some of the history but ties it in with what's happening today. this is the ticket!
 A rather ordinary book about an extraordinary hellhole November 22, 2008
Tim Butcher was the African correspondent for the London Daily Telegraph, the newspaper that sponsored two of Henry Stanley's African expeditions. Butcher got the notion to re-trace Stanley's trek across the Congo, from Lake Tanganyika to the mouth of the Congo River on the Atlantic Ocean. In 2004, during a relative lull in the bloodshed and anarchic mayhem that has convulsed the interior of the Congo for decades, Buther took six weeks to make the journey, by motor-bike, UN river boats, pirogue, helicopter, and jeep. BLOOD RIVER is his account of his trek, interspersed with history of the Congo, from the initial colonization of the Portuguese, to the brutal and greedy rule of King Leopold and the Belgians, to the post-colonial era, during which the rape and exploitation of the country, and the attendant bloodshed, has continued apace, perhaps at times even intensifying.
There undoubtedly is much of interest and value in BLOOD RIVER, but there are three overriding problems with the book. First, I have the sense that Butcher tends to be sloppy with his facts. For example, he implies that ebola was one of the tropical diseases that confronted 19th-Century European explorers and he states that Joseph Conrad, when he came to the Congo for his one mission there (the basis for Conrad's "The Heart of Darkness"), was "a professional skipper of steamboats." Minor errors, to be sure, but they force me to take all of Butcher's factual pronouncements with a grain of salt.
Second, Butcher's writing is ordinary. He is prone to needless repetition, and far too often his writing is cliched and overly melodramatic. For example: "That moment when I left the east bank of the river was special for me. I had achieved something that many people had thought impossible by crossing overland from Lake Tanganyika all the way to the Congo River, through some of the most dangerous terrain on the planet. With my own eyes I had peered into a hidden African world * * *." Or: "I sat in the darkness, thinking of my journey so far and how remote this area had become. A yachtsman on the southern seas or a climber in the Himalayas had more chance of rescue than I did."
Third, Butcher is not what you would call self-effacing. He is mightily impressed with himself and he tries mightily to make sure that we are equally impressed. Time and again, he writes about how dangerous and unprecedented, even reckless, his trip was. To be sure, for six weeks he had to endure tropical heat and insects, eat unappetizing native foods such as cassava, wait in squalid quarters while he made arrangements for the next leg of his journey, and be harassed by some officious and arrogant Congolese. But nothing life-threatening or especially painful actually happened to him.
Reading BLOOD RIVER is not a waste of time. In particular, it reinforces the principal point I have taken from other books on contemporary equatorial Africa, namely, that conditions now are worse than they were a third of a century ago and there is little reason to believe they will improve in the near future. But, whether you are interested in the Congo or the genre of adventure travel, there are other books out there that are more worth your time.
This must be Africa's broken heart. November 18, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
In this unforgettable African odyssey, the London Daily Telegraph's Tim Butcher takes the reader on a dangerous and disturbing 44-day trek along the path of the Congo River, from the heart of sub-Saharan Africa to the Atlantic Ocean. Butcher's trip, which he dubs "ordeal travel," proceeds through the heart of the Congo (formerly the Belgian Congo, later Zaire) by motorbike, barge and dugout canoe, guided at times by a pygmy human rights activist, a UN riverboat captain and a Congolese gangster, threatened by gunfire, shakedowns, killer ants, psychotic militiamen and whispers of cannibalism.
Why risk it? The project is variously driven by the journalist's hunger to understand the most lawless and physically impenetrable country on his beat (which, mindbogglingly, encompasses much of the African continent), to indulge a personal obsession with the Congo that began after his first reporting trip in 2001, and to carry off the seemingly impossible feat of doing the whole trip overland, following in the footsteps of the British explorer --- and fellow Telegraph employee --- Henry Morton Stanley, the first outsider to chart the Congo River in 1877. (Stanley is also remembered for tracking down the Scottish explorer Dr. David Livingstone, who had been missing in the Congo for several years, leaving the phrase "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" to eclipse Livingstone's rightful legacy.)
Outside one or two cities, conditions in the Congo are so ferociously violent and anarchic that every official and unofficial source Butcher approached in three years of planning told him the trip was suicidal. As recently as the 1960s, the Congo had an elaborate network of functioning roads, railways, buses and even luxury ocean-going liners, built (using with near-slave labor) by Belgian colonialists who controlled the Congo from 1884 to 1960. But since independence, a series of deeply corrupt rulers and the bloodiest civil war on the planet have left rival militias to terrorize the country. Some 1,500 Congolese still die every day from war-related causes and thousands of miles of road, airports and enormous stretches of previously navigable Congo river have been abandoned so that almost no one travels anywhere except by air. Butcher despairingly finds towns on his route where a Belgian traveler could once have bought a commercial ferry ticket, but which are now among the few spots on earth to fail what he calls the "Can you buy a Coke?" test. (You could, he writes, sooner fly to the moon.)
One of Butcher's most crushing discoveries is that, because anti-government militias and government soldiers alike regularly brutalize cities and villages, millions of defenseless Congolese now view the bush as the only place they can really be safe. In a perverse reversal of progress, over and over again Butcher is told that he is the only white man some of these remote villages have seen in decades. He speaks with old men who can remember visiting cities, seeing cars, greeting trains and receiving mail, but whose grandchildren have never done any of these things.
It's all the more tragic because the Congo's enormous natural resources --- ivory, rubber, timber, diamond, gold, copper and cobalt deposits --- should make it the richest country in Africa. But with no functioning rule of law or infrastructure, Butcher instead finds mines that are nothing but raw pits where desperate miners claw at minerals with their bare hands, collapses are routine, and, because of corruption, theft, bribery and the inability to provide anything but grunt labor, the local people receive almost nothing.
Describing a new kind of Heart of Darkness, Butcher asserts that the real history of the Congo is one of theft, specifically theft of its sovereignty --- first by the Belgians and later by its own vicious and selfish African elites, who, since the late dictator Mobutu took power in 1965, have continued to live in luxury in the Congo's one functioning city, Kinshasa, running it as what he terms "a perfect kleptocracy." In a sign of real despair, some Congolese he met who were trapped by geography and circumstance in increasingly cut-off towns in the jungle "were so desperate they actually pined for the old and brutal order of Belgian colonial life." Only the restoration of law and order and a real justice system has any chance of turning this violent free-for-all back into a country worthy of the name, Butcher is told again and again.
Not surprisingly, a current of anger flows through this river journey, surging forth in Butcher's account of the most heartbreaking encounter of the trip. In the town of Kisangani he seeks the help of a local fisherman and guide, Oggi Saidi, while trying to hitch a ride on a boat headed out of town. Two weeks later, his berth on a UN river patrol secured, he has one last beer with Oggi but is powerless to help when Oggi asks him, a near-stranger, to smuggle his 14-year-old son onto the ship with him, to take him to South Africa, to save him from the Congo. This must be Africa's broken heart.
--- Reviewed by Elliott Walker
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