Congo - Michael Crichton

...settings. No. Like Jurassic Park, Congo is set in a tropical location, this time the Congo rainforests (hence the title) as oppose to a tropical island. The book deals withunnatural animals slaughtering our intrepid team, but the similarities stop here.

Congo is excellent. It has it all, a staple of Crichtons works. It has science, humanity, carnivosous animals, the futility of technology against nature, and a rip- roaring plot to ...
...went missing while searchign the Congo for a valuable blue diamond. The last ERTS hear of the team is from a video uplink, showing a devestated basecamp, dead teammembers and a fleeting glimpse fo what could be a gorilla...

ERTS sends in its second team, accompanied by teh mercenary soldier and guide Munro, who is a kind of Ray Mears mixed with GI Joe, and Dr. Peter Elliot, a primatologist trying to return a gorilla named Amy, fluent ... more

Anyone who started reading Crichton in the early Nineties could be forgiven for thinking that this man wrote about life and death situations involving unnatural animals, in exotic tropical settings. No. Like Jurassic Park, Congo is set in a tropical location, this time the Congo rainforests (hence the title) as oppose to a tropical island. The book deals withunnatural animals slaughtering our intrepid team, but the similarities stop here.

Congo is excellent. It has it all, a staple of Crichtons works. It has science, humanity, carnivosous animals, the futility of technology against nature, and a rip- roaring plot to boot. Congo deals with a company named Earth Resources Technology Services (ERTS), and one of its team that went missing while searchign the Congo for a valuable blue diamond. The last ERTS hear of the team is from a video uplink, showing a devestated basecamp, dead teammembers and a fleeting glimpse fo what could be a gorilla...

ERTS sends in its second team, accompanied by teh mercenary soldier and guide Munro, who is a kind of Ray Mears mixed with GI Joe, and Dr. Peter Elliot, a primatologist trying to return a gorilla named Amy, fluent in sign language, back to the Congo jungle. Amy not only allows the gorilla- human communications later vital to the teams survival, but also hold the key to the gray gorillas activity. As the team venture into the Congo, they are faced with an active volcano, superstitious porters, cannibalistic pygamies and the Congolese army, but these pale in comparison to the threat which the gray gorilla will pose. Once you read about the gray gorillas past though...you will begin to have a little more sympathy for them, and less for the humans who after thousands of years venture into the Congo for the same reason. Diamonds. Read it and understand!

This book also holds dear everything Crichton fans could want. he explains every detail of the plot in staggaring byut bnot too confusing detail. I would never have belived how cut- throat corporaiosn can be, until I read about the quasi- milatary lengths to which ERTS goes to secure its diamonds. Sure, its fiction but...

The book gets better and better toward the end, and teh final battle with the gray gorillas is astounding, more like Vietnam than the Congo jungles.
 

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