I read this book because I really liked the authors previous book, Blood River. Mr Butcher, is a much stronger and more adventurous person than I am. After the hell he endured chronicling the story for Blood River, he decided to double down and travel by foot the same path Graham Greene did in "Journey Without Maps"- from 1935. This book takes place in 2009, and in many ways the countries visited in the book: Sierra Leone, Liberia and a couple of days in Guinea, have not changed in nearly 75 years. Except to become worse. These are countries that have not had any real level of stability for the last 40 years, having been run by extremely corrupt governments who were brutally violent, against their perceived enemies, and who buried their countries with horrible pointless wars. Add to this the fact that this area of the world exposes people to yellow fever, Lassa, Ebola, Malaria, and lord knows what other pathogens, that the people in the West only read about, and yet the author thought walking on barely defined jungle trails would be a worthy adventure to write about. Thank god there are people like Tim Butcher, who can expose to the reader, countries like these, while also giving history and insight into why these countries are the way they are, and how sadly much of the projects and work of the UN and NGO's makes little or no difference. (My opinion, not necessarily the authors). I would love to meet this author and find out more than he divulged in the book as to why he would undertake such a difficult endeavor, as this that he wrote about in Chasing The Devil. ( )

Part travel, part glimpse into one of Africa's bleak history and location ( )

I read this book because I really liked the authors previous book, Blood River. Mr Butcher, is a much stronger and more adventurous person than I am. After the hell he endured chronicling the story for Blood River, he decided to double down and travel by foot the same path Graham Greene did in "Journey Without Maps"- from 1935. This book takes place in 2009, and in many ways the countries visited in the book: Sierra Leone, Liberia and a couple of days in Guinea, have not changed in nearly 75 years. Except to become worse. These are countries that have not had any real level of stability for the last 40 years, having been run by extremely corrupt governments who were brutally violent, against their perceived enemies, and who buried their countries with horrible pointless wars. Add to this the fact that this area of the world exposes people to yellow fever, Lassa, Ebola, Malaria, and lord knows what other pathogens, that the people in the West only read about, and yet the author thought walking on barely defined jungle trails would be a worthy adventure to write about. Thank god there are people like Tim Butcher, who can expose to the reader, countries like these, while also giving history and insight into why these countries are the way they are, and how sadly much of the projects and work of the UN and NGO's makes little or no difference. (My opinion, not necessarily the authors). I would love to meet this author and find out more than he divulged in the book as to why he would undertake such a difficult endeavor, as this that he wrote about in Chasing The Devil. ( )

I only read half of this - and will read the other half some other time. Again it was in preparation for a trip to Sierra Leone, and it was thanks to a fortuitous interview with Tim Butcher on Radio 4's Excess Baggage. Driving along the roads of northern Sierra Leone, and through the hills above Freetown where the chimpanzee rehabilitation centre is based, and discussing the book with a VSO volunteer doctor who'd also read it before he came out there brought a lot of Tim Butcher's observations and interviews with people back to me. And it was doubly interesting since I'd just read Graham Greene too. ( )