African 'Journeys' with Tim Butcher and Anthony Sattin - Sept 27th, 2010

September 6 2010 , Written by thediversetraveller Published on #Africa, #Anthony Sattin, #Chalke Authors, #DiverseTraveller.com - Women Who Travel, Write, Snap & Share, #Florence Nightingale, #Graham Greene, #Journeys, #Ola Fagbohun, #Recommendations & Rants (tips, links and reviews), #Sierra Leone and Liberia, #Time Butcher, #travel writing

Join me, ticket price £7.50, on Sept 27th, 2010, Stanfords (b ook store) in central London for Journeys, where authors Tim Butcher and Anthony Sattin will be talking about their latest books and discussing the art of Travel Writing.

You can purchase tickets from Stanfords on 020 7373 4997, the tickets cost £7.50 and include a glass of wine.

Read on to find out more about Tim Butcher's and Anthony Sattin's new books:

Chasing the Devil: The Search for Africa's Fighting Spirit by Tim Butcher

For many years Sierra Leone and Liberia have been too dangerous to travel through, bedevilled 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 in his bestseller - Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart - this time he pursues a trail blazed by Graham Greene in 1935 and immortalised in the travel classic Journey without Maps (Vintage Classics). Greene took 26 bearers, a case of scotch, and hammocks 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 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.

He encounters other 'devils', masked figures guarding the spiritual secrets of jungle communities. Some are no more threatening than schoolmasters but others are much more sinister, relying on ritual cannibalism as a source of their magical power. Tim encounters these devils on an epic journey that demands courage, doggedness and good fortune.

Chasing the Devil: The Search for Africa's Fighting Spirit is a dramatic travel book touching on one of the most fraught parts of the globe at a unique moment in its history. Weaving history and anthropology with personal narrative - as well as new discoveries about Greene - it is as exciting as it is enlightening.

A Winter on the Nile by Anthony Sattin

In the winter of 1849, Florence Nightingale was an unknown 29-year-old - beautiful, well-born and deeply unhappy. After clashing with her parents over her refusal to marry, she had been offered a lifeline by family friends who suggested a trip to Egypt, a country which she had always longed to visit.

A Winter on the Nile follows her journey along the Nile: a romantic adventure, but also a deeply spiritual one. It was during the trip that she found emotional recovery, the inspiration to resist parental pressure and the resolve to pursue her dream of a career in nursing.

By an extraordinary coincidence, taking the same boat from Alexandria was an unpublished French writer, Gustave Flaubert. Like Nightingale, he was at the crossroads in his life that was to lead to future acclaim and literary triumph. As it did for her, Egypt for him represented escape and freedom as well as inspiration. But as a wealthy young man travelling with male friends, he had access to an altogether different Egypt: where Nightingale sought out temples and dispensaries, Flaubert visited brothels and harems.

Both of them were entranced, moved and liberated by the wonders of the Nile. As privileged early travellers, they saw an ancient landscape unchanged for centuries, and visited monuments still familiar to tourists today. And both wrote magnificently about the sights they saw.

A Winter on the Nile is a book about a key moment in the life of Florence Nightingale, a tantalising portrait of a young woman on the brink of international fame. But it also wonderfully counterpoints her journey with that of a future French literary genius, and it provides fascinating insight into the early days of travel to one of the greatest tourist destinations on the planet.

I look forward to seeing you there.

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