Archive for the ‘Travel’ Category
by Amanda on Oct 30th, 2012
Kalk Bay Books invites you to attend a literary presentation by Tim Butcher, titled “Our Man in Cape Town – Graham Greene’s Love Affair with Africa”
Travel is key to Graham Greene’s greatness as a writer, the ability to use foreign adventures to frame timeless stories, famously in Mexico, Cuba and Indo-China that gave us The Power and the Glory, Our Man in Havana and The Quiet American.
But it was to Africa that Greene journeyed when he left Europe for the first time beginning a lifelong but overlooked passion, one that would draw him repeatedly back to Africa, culminating in a martini-fuelled frolic through the Cape as wingman to Sestigers stalwart, Etienne le Roux.
Join us for an evening of stories and readings, including many fascinating facts and details that Butcher has unearthed during his research.
Tim Butcher is a British journalist and broadcaster now based in Cape Town. He is the author of two books, Blood River (following the route of Stanley’s 1874–77 journey into the Congo), and Chasing the Devil, for which he followed the trail of Graham Greene through Sierra Leone and Liberia.
Event Details
- Date: Tuesday, 06 November 2012
- Time: 6:30 PM for 7:00 PM
- Venue: Kalk Bay Books
124 Main Road
Kalk Bay | Map
- Refreshments: Cash bar
- Cover charge: R80
- RSVP: Kalk Bay Books, 021 788 2266
KalK Bay Books website
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by Amanda on May 20th, 2011
Tim Butcher, author of Chasing the Devil, spent a week exploring Lesotho. Butcher says if you took away the warmth of the sun and the 600-foot waterfall, you could just as easily have been on Rannoch Moor in Argyll:
The track left fields that had been regimented by South African farmers and switchbacked its way skywards up the Drakensberg escarpment to the very different, wilder country of Lesotho. Up here there was no big game, no dry savannah nor tropical forest, but the biggest skies you will ever see and a giddying sense of standing on the roof of the continent.
I spent a week exploring this fascinatingly untypical African country, hiking across its vast sprung-mattress tundra of grasslands framed by rocky outcrops and studded only occasionally by the rondavel dwellings of Basotho people. Take away the warmth of the African sun and I could have been on Rannoch Moor in Argyll.
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by Amanda on Feb 11th, 2011
When Tim Butcher became the Daily Telegraph‘s correspondent for South Africa, he decided to go on a journey following the Congo River, just like Henry Stanley did when he was correspondent for the same newspaper in 1876.
In a BBC Radio 4 podcast, a group of readers ask Butcher about the travel book based on his Congo experience, titled Blood River:
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by Amanda on Jan 19th, 2011
The author speaks about the origins of his latest book, set in Liberia and Sierrra Leone, Chasing the Devil:
Butcher, a former war correspondent, is no stranger to epic journeys. His first book, Blood River, was a British bestseller about his attempt to travel down the Congo river.
He spoke about his new book.
Q: What was the motivation behind the current book?
A: Fear and frustration motivate the journey described in Chasing the Devil. I wanted to know more about Sierra Leone and Liberia, countries that rarely feature on the radar of world attention. And I was frustrated that while covering them as a journalist during their civil wars I had never been able to get more than a part picture.
It left me feeling as if I had a stone in my shoe, a niggle I wanted to deal with once and for all.
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by Ben - Editor on Jan 12th, 2011
Michele Magwood’s Magwood & Twigg Book Salon kicks of 2011 with a chat with Chasing the Devil author Tim Butcher.
The book tracks Butcher’s journey across Sierra Leone and Liberia – a 350 mile trek that follows a trail blazed by Graham Greene in 1935 and immortalised in the travel classic Journey Without Maps.
Don’t miss this adventurer-author in conversation with interviewer extraordinaire Michele Magwood. Booking essential!
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by Amanda on Jan 11th, 2011
Today we share a highlight from Oscar’s “world woof tour” with his owner Joanna Lefson, who has now published a book on the adventure, Ahound the World: My Travels with Oscar. The pair stopped off in Istanbul to help spread awareness about rescuing abandoned dogs from animal shelters. The highlight is reported in Turkish newspaper Today’s Zaman, and documents Oscar’s warm reception by Yedikule Animal Shelter in Istanbul:
Speaking to Today’s Zaman during the second stop of his journey in İstanbul, Oscar the dog said his main purpose was to better explain to humans what it means to be a dog. Oscar says he is also seeking to raise awareness about animal rights. Most importantly however, he is calling on humans to adopt “noble-souled dogs” from shelters instead of buying them from puppy mills or pet stores. His new mom, Joanne Lefson, is also helping Oscar in his cause to draw attention to canine suffering in shelters around the world. Lefson explains, “He wants his caged friends, who number around 475 million all over the world, to be free and stop suffering.” According to Lefson, even though Oscar comes from an ordinary quadruped family, he has a noble soul and heart; which is why he took on the mission to help dogs worldwide.
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by Amanda on Nov 29th, 2010
The Sunday Times books editor wants to know what went into the making of Chasing the Devil:
How did this idea of following Graham Greene’s journey through Sierra Leone and Liberia come about?
I had a troubled relationship with Sierra Leone and Liberia because I went there as a journalist from here (South Africa) covering it from 2001 to 2003, lost a couple of friends there and had a death threat put on me by Charles Taylor in 2003.
There isn’t a tradition of Liberian authors or Sierra Leone authors but weirdly there’s Graham Greene, this great literary figure who goes there when he is 30. He has great success with his first novel, but four books in he’s literally struggling to put food on the table and he has a young child so what does he do? He goes and gets a commission for nonfiction, and that’s helpful because you get guaranteed money upfront.
Back in the 1930s it was quite a cool thing to do. Evelyn Waugh was doing it here in Africa, Peter Fleming was doing it elsewhere, and others were doing it in the Middle East. He goes with a woman, like any man there’s a woman behind you, but in Greene’s case there’s a woman astride, a woman behind, a woman in every corner. He was an amazing bloke; he could barely keep his trousers on. So in 1935 he takes this woman with him, his cousin Barbara, and they both write books so I get two books – Journey without Maps and Land Benighted. They give me the fix point.
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by Amanda on Nov 23rd, 2010
Zebra Press and The Bay Bookshop invite you to the launch of Chasing the Devil: The Search for Africa’s Fighting Spirit by Tim Butcher.
For many years Sierra Leone and Liberia have been to dangerous to travel through, bedeviled by a uniquely brutal form of violence from which sprang many of Africa’s cruellest contemporary icons – child soldiers, prisoner mutilation, blood diamonds. With their wars officially over, Tim Butcher sets out on a journey across both countries, trekking for 350 miles through remote rainforest and malarial swamps. Just as he followed H.M. Stanley through the Congo – a journey described as his bestseller Blood River – this time he pursues a trail blazed by Graham Greene in 1935 and immortalised in the travel classic Journey Without Maps in which he and his cousin Barbara were carried. Tim walks every blistering inch to gain an extraordinary ground-level view of a troubled and overlooked region.
As a journalist in Africa, Tim came to know both countries well although the wars made the trips to the jungle hinterland far too risky. This is where he now heads, exploring how rebel groups thrived in the bush for so long and whether the devil of war has truly been chased away.
Hear more of Butcher’s story: see you at the Bay Bookshop!
Event Details
- Date: Tuesday, 30 November 2010
- Time: 5:30 PM for 6:00 PM
- Venue: The Bay Bookshop
27 Somerset Road
cnr. Dixon Street
126 The Square, Level One
Cape Quarter
Green Point
Cape Town
- RSVP: capequarter@baybookshop.co.za, 021 421 1301
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by Amanda on Nov 22nd, 2010
The launch of Tim Butcher’s most recent book, Chasing the Devil: The Search for Africa’s Fighting Spirit, was well received at Kalk Bay Books on an evening that was, coincidentally, the bookshop’s fourth anniversary.
Interviewer for the evening Donald Paul described Ann Donald’s shop as “a pool of sanity in our midst that keeps us going”. Hearty cheers rose from the audience, along with a toast courtesy the generously sponsored Leopard’s Leap wines.
Paul said that Butcher’s books (his first, the best-seller Blood River, was an account of his journey in the wake of the explorer HM Stanley) should be compulsory reading – in particular for those who blithely claim “I am an African” and wax lyrical about the “African Renaissance”.
Butcher, who traced the footsteps of Graham Greene in a bid to explore Sierra Leone and Liberia, did not have the entourage of 26 lackeys bearing hammocks, tins of golden syrup and crates of whisky that liberated Greene to gather limes by the wayside for his refreshment. (Greene’s account of his trip was published as Journey Without Maps.)
The author’s ideas on the apparently “humanitarian” move to relocate freed slaves from the UK to Sierra Leone shocked some. He maintained that it was little more than thinly veiled racism. “After the emancipation of the slaves, the locals in Manchester didn’t want black faces in Stockport!” he said.
Chasing the Devil contains a journey of 350 miles – a trek through remote rainforest and malarial swamps – and encounters with the merely devilish, more sinister types up to all kinds of devilry, and, indeed, possibly even the devil himself.
At Kalk Bay Books we had a sooty foretaste and wanted mouthfuls more. Don’t miss this riveting read!
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