Customer Reviews

CONGO

5 star:		(97)
4 star:		(86)
3 star:		(37)
2 star:		(20)
1 star:		(17)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

"Congo" is the second book that I've read by Michael Crichton. The first being "Timeline." It's been quite a few years since I first read that book and I remember enjoying it very much. I failed to see the movie for it and really don't care to, especially now. When the film version of "Congo" hit the screens a few years ago, I enjoyed it thoroughly. It reminded me of all the old jungle flicks from the golden age of cinema. However, now having read the book, I feel somewhat cheated by its celluloid counterpart. This book is so much more engaging that it really is a shame how the movie fails to do it justice.

While the core of the story, a team is sent out to find diamonds key to technological advances and they use a young grad student and his signing gorilla as cover to sneak into Africa, is still there, the book contains elements not even mentioned in the film. We get to know the expedition party a lot better in the book. We also have a lot more conflicts and meetings with the locals such as Pygmies, Kigani, and General Muguru and his men. Also, the gray gorillas are given a nice and complete treatment. I felt like I knew them better in this book than most of the human characters in the film.

The film added quite a few things. For one, the gorilla, Amy, doesn't wander around in a boxy sign translator. Only Peter Elliot joins the group's escapade to the Congo, not his assistant as in the movie. The grisly death of the first team is found in the movie, but the book mentions nothing of Dr. Karen Ross having any type of relationship with one of the original team's members. In fact, she comes across as very frigid and uninterested in finding a boyfriend in the jungle. Tim Curry's character, while funny in the film, is non-existent here.

The book moves at a very quick pace. Even when Crichton goes off on a class lecture about gorilla behavior or the advanced (for 1980) state of communications, he still manages to hold the reader's attention.

Overall, this is a wonderful jungle thriller. If you enjoy authors such as Clive Cussler, you're sure to enjoy Crichton. His writing is intelligent, fun, and easy to digest even though it's full of factual information that, in textbook form, would be wretchedly boring.

Highly recommended.

I found myself on vacation with no book...tragic. I remedied this with a copy of Congo.

As I read Congo, the story of diamond hunters in, yes, the Congo, I realized how much has changed since 1980. A cutting edge computer thriller, it has references pinball machines, five-inch floppies, 256Kmemory and portable cassette tape players. Yet it was also current, with its talk of DNA testing and the competitive threat of both the Japanese and Chinese in the world markets.

Congo has it all: competing international diamond hunters, the Congo, African pygmies, cannibalistic tribes, various warring countries and factions, lost cities of bygone centuries, active volcanoes, sign-language gorillas, geographic history, gorilla history, African and Congo history, a possible new species of gorilla with its own agenda, communications satellites, plane crashes, hot air balloons, and, well I'm sure I'm leaving something out. Michael Crichton's deft writing brings it all together for an enjoyable action romp that works....almost. If anything suffers in the book it is the characters. So much is packed into the story that the characters do not develop, and are almost relegated to following the action, which never ends. The author has to explain a lot to the reader so that we can follow along. He does this as the narrator and often includes it in character dialogue. So much information is presented as dialogue that I get the picture of very educated people, stuck in the Congo with killer gorillas and dead bodies, finally snapping and pummeling each other to the ground yelling, "Why are you being so redundant? I KNOW all this stuff!" The reader often won't, however, making it important but at times slowing the book down.

I wondered how this book could be made into a movie, and on a whim rented the 1995 thriller. The movie works by leaving a lot out (no cannibals, competing groups, and not even one African pygmy, among other things) and by breathing life into the characters and even introducing new ones. It does not do the book justice, but it does do what the book does not; it brings the characters to life.

Congo ends with a three-page reference of all the works Crichton studied and referenced in writing the book. It was impressive and shows his ability to take so much and make it work. Before this reference section was an epilogue explaining what happened to the books major characters when the adventure had ended. I found myself less interested in this and more interested in the reference list, as Karen, Peter, Munro and the rest never really impacted me, and were lost in a thriller that has everything but the kitchen sink.

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._

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.

The film adaptation of this novel was criminal. Do not let that movie turn you off from this fantastic novel (my personal favorite from Crichton). The overall plot is the same: a research team disappears after an apparent attack by gorillas. A second team is dispatched to discover what happened and comes under attack from the same violent gorillas. Like other Crichton novels, this contains a lot of description and explanation of various sciences and technologies that surround the characters. Unfortunately, the technology is dated because of the 1980 publication date. Nevertheless, the action and suspense in this novel are first-rate. This was the first Crichton novel I ever read and it made me a fan instantly. I've read almost every Crichton novel since because of this book. This is one of those books you can't put down until you finish it. When you're done, you just want to read it again.

Earth Resources Technology Services wants something that's hidden deep in the jungles of the Congo, at the Lost City of Zinj. Because it's a resource that can make nuclear power obsolete, others want it just as badly. When their Congo field team's satellite check-in gets interrupted by the deaths of all its members, apparently at the hands of a band of gorillas behaving in totally atypical fashion, ERTS dispatches supervisor Karen Ross to lead the next attempt. As the 24-year-old mathematics prodigy and her new team fight their way toward a goal they may never reach, her drive to succeed may be what keeps them alive. Or it may just as easily be what finally kills them, too.

Joining the ERTS team are primatologist Peter Elliot and Amy, an adolescent gorilla trained by Elliot to communicate using American Sign Language. Ross hopes Amy may make a difference if they encounter the first team's killers, while Elliot has his own agenda. Meanwhile, the Congo's chronic unrest boils over into tribal warfare - and the local volcano threatens to just plain boil over.

I picked this book up expecting a "not his best" effort by one of my favorite authors, after finding the movie version rather - well - hokey. But what came across that way on the screen works fine in Crichton's prose. A wild roller coaster ride! Great fun, and a nice tribute to H. Rider Haggard, too.

If you are going to be at the beach , then Congo is clearly the book for you. Congo is a good old-fashioned jungle adventure yarn. The author, Michael Crichton, was clearly inspired by the adventure stories of H. Rider Haggard but with a slight dose of Conrad. And since this is a Crichton novel, the reader will read about technological ruminations, which provoke Crichton's favorite theme - man meddling with nature when he probably shouldn't.

A rescue team, funded (and partially staffed) by a U.S. based technology corporation, is sent to the middle of the Congo area of Africa to determine the mysterious disappearance of a prior team. On their extraordinary journey, they encounter rebellious armed forces of central African nations, fabulous cities with lost treasures, strange tribes tucked away in the forest, cannibalistic groups and some unknown force that appears to kill. Crichton keeps the pace swift so you will keep the pages turning.

This book is a delightful read because Crichton delivers on his trademarks. He blends well-researched topics from diverse sciences - Congo covers biology, anthropology, archaeology, as well as descriptions of high-tech equipment (for 1979). Crichton effectively increases the suspense by giving the locations scale and a powerful perspective. The mountains, "unending virginal forest", and "thousands of miles of unexplored territory" dwarf his human characters. Finally, Crichton's storytelling gift of framing the story as a true account (along with an extensive bibliography) lends the verisimilitude that so often elevates Crichton's work.

You will not be disappointed with this quick read.