Congo

Customer Reviews

• The Most Entertaining Novel Since "Jurassic Park"  Oct 19, 1999 (17 of 20 found this helpful)

  This novel kept me on the edge of my seat the whole time I read. Michael Crichton does a good job displaying realism in this realistic science fiction novel. He creates a story in the darkest region of the Congo, near the Lost City of Zinj,where an eight-person expedition dies brutally in a matter of seconds. At the home base back in Houston, supervisors watch a gruesome video transmission of the ill-fated team: dead bodies, tents crushed, and a blurred dark moving image. A new expedition is sent to the Congo. Some are in search for diamonds while a primatologist is taking his gorilla Amy, who knows sign language, back to her home in the Congo. During the expedition they encounter trouble with the native tribes and man-eating gorillas. Many people die and there is a lot of action in this thriller. Life threatening creatures and jungle weather creates a setting which makes this book so entertaining. This book can be compared to "Jurassic Park." Both display great action scenes and interesting stories by the same author. I recommend this book greatly if you are either a science-fiction or suspense thriller fan.

• Bring home Congo, bring home the fun!!!   Oct 27, 2005 (5 of 5 found this helpful)

  In Houston, Texas, a shocking video from the Congo appears before the eyes of Karen Ross, a scientist of the company ERTS. She sees the campsite of ERTS' current expedition destroyed and its members dead. Karen Ross is sent to the Congo to find out what happened with the help of a primatologist by the name of Peter Elliot, Peter's gorilla that is fluent in sign language, Amy, and an experienced guide named Munro with his crew of porters. Karen discovers that she must race to the Congo against German and Japanese scientists to find a specific diamond that may hold the key to the future, and she is driven to succeed at any cost. They must face bellicose hippos and tribes of fierce cannibals. As the expedition progresses, a vicious new species may tamper with the success of the expedition, and with the crew's lives.
  
  I would have to say this is one of Michael Crichton's finest works. The book gives plenty of background information, making it easy to understand the plot and what's going on. After awhile, it is impossible to put the book down for its extravagant details and stunning scenes. The action is well described and sucks you into the book. The characters are very three dimensional and many have such great personalities that make the book's slower parts fun and interesting. One of the most interesting characters would have to be Amy, the gorilla fluent in sign language. She makes even the most fearsome scenes hilarious. The only reason I didn't give this book five stars is because it is not incisive enough, for it takes about 150 pages for the book to really draw you in.
  
  I highly recommend this book, for it is one of the best books I've read in years.

• Crichton ahead of official science yet again  Nov 15, 2005 (6 of 7 found this helpful)

  Paying attention to anecdotes and rumours can get you a long way - not just in developing fictional plots, but in anticipating by decades "discoveries" in science, such as the finding of the mysterious deadly hunting great apes of Congo near Bili, "found" and reported by actual scientists in 2004. The similarities to what was described in Crichton's book are notable.
  Cite is from BBC Science News 12 Oct 2004 (based on an article in New Scientist):
  "Primatologist Shelly Williams is thought to be the only scientist to have seen the apes.
  
  During her visit to DR Congo two years ago, she says she captured them on video and located their nests.
  
  She describes her encounter with them: "Four suddenly came rushing out of the bush towards me," she told New Scientist.
  
  "If this had been a bluff charge, they would have been screaming to intimidate us. These guys were quiet. And they were huge. They were coming in for the kill. I was directly in front of them, and as soon as they saw my face, they stopped and disappeared." "
  
  She also mentioned that some of them had gone gray, apparently fairly early in life, and completely gray rather than the gray-and-black of known gorilla species. The locals say they are very deadly, hunt cooperatively and silently, and will kill lions.
  
  That doesn't mean they talk -- just thought Crichton's research abilities should be commemorated with some clips from this discovery.

• Wretched!  Aug 7, 2000 (6 of 7 found this helpful)

  I loved _The Andromeda Strain_, _The Terminal Man_ was great, but this! It's enough to make you wonder if we're talking about the same Michael Crichton.

  It wasn't the dated technology that put me off -- there was a time when I too thought 256K was a lot of RAM -- it was the... unthinkingness of the novel. F'rinstance: the satellite link has enough bandwidth for video, but not for voice -- an un-overlookable gaffe for a science-fiction writer. And later in the book our intrepid adventurers discover a mine-shaft in a cliff face with gem stones sticking out of the walls not ten feet from the entrance -- as if anyone would keep digging when he could just pluck the gems out of the dirt. Flubs like that stop a story cold.

  And *then* (SPOILER WARNING!) after all this hoo-haw, the monsters turn out to be gorillias who hit folks in the head with rocks. No, they don't throw the rocks with deadly accuracy; neither do they set up clever ambushes. They just walk up to people and bash them. And for all their space age, motion-sensing gatling-guns, our heroes just can't seem to deal with that. Spare me!

  Save your money, re-read _The Andromeda Strain._

• Peter loves Amy (so does everybody else)  Mar 23, 2002 (8 of 10 found this helpful)

  Who in the world but Michael Crichton would write a book about talking gorillas, with 65 references in the back for further reading? "Congo" is a lightning-fast-paced techno-adventure story about an expedition to the lost city of Zinj, deep in the darkest heart of Africa. Two rival teams are racing to be first on the site, where lies a fabulous treasure of boron diamonds that are going to change the world as we know it. One team is made up of a greedy conglomerate (Germans and Japanese, wouldn't you know); the other is headed by a brilliant but cold-blooded young scientist named Karen Ross who is accompanied by an eccentric adventurer, a primatologist named Peter Elliot, and Peter's laboratory subject, a mountain gorilla named Amy. Amy has been the cause of concern among animal rights activists who feel she is being mistreated (actually, many humans don't have it as good as Amy), so Peter wants to get her out of the country and back to her natural habitat. The race to get to the diamonds first involves encounters with rampaging hippos, a murderous tribe of cannibals, and sneaky doings by the rival team who briefly drug and kidnap Amy. But what they find once they reach the site is not only diamonds, but something so unimagined and terrifying that it doesn't even have a name. Suffice to say, it's able to create all kinds of mayhem before the book reaches its climax.

  Like all his other books, "Congo" suffers from one-dimensional characters, and Crichton has an infuriating habit of referring to females in their twenties as "girls" (would he call a 24 year old male a "boy"?). But in Amy, Crichton has come up with a winner. Amy is more of a personality than any human in the book. She's bright (she has a vocabulary of 600 signs and can say whatever she wants to), she's funny, she's very much a lady (she loves lipstick and she's choosy about the colors of the sweaters she wears); she has a temperamental side (she sulks and pouts when things don't go her way), she loves Peter and she's insanely jealous of his lady friends. The action and adventure zip right along, but Amy is what makes this book such a fun read.