Butcher is blunt and quick to draw conclusions, but they are usually pretty reasonable. Riding a UN barge down the river, he muses about UN missions: "yes the missions are sloppy and poorly focused, but that is precisely because the international community's attitude to complicated problems ... is sloppy and poorly focused. When the United Nations Security Council addresses these international problems, the question it ends up addressing is not 'What is the right thing to do' but 'What is the least we can do?'"

I've focused here on the analytical and historical aspects of Blood River, because that is what interests me most, but there's also plenty of derring-do, and some pretty serious adventure in places well beyond much hope of rescue. If you wanted to read the book simply as an account of that, you'd also enjoy it, and still probably pick up a little knowledge of a region of the world that really deserves every bit as much attention — on political and humanitarian grounds — as the Middle East.