In classic Crichton style, Congo is filled with well-researched and documented facts of science and technology, lending an air of authenticity to this otherwise extraordinary adventure tale. With the help of a weathered guide, African porteres, and an inteligent gorilla named Amy, the Congo expedition fights its way through cannible country, war zones, and geological dangers in order to seek out the blue diamonds of Zinj for what was in the early ’80s the future of computer technology. Using the timeless themes of adventure, scientific discovery, and old fashioned greed, Crichton takes his readers on a trek through the mountains and jungles of Africa to the lost city of Zinj: hidden, forgotten, haunted. Evolutionary thinking and Godlessness aside, Congo is a pretty darn good story.
And this time the man succeeded in swaying me back to enjoying his writing. Several Crichton fans, however, had told me that Congo was his best book, so I figured I would give him another chance to break the good-book/bad-book tie. I have read several Michael Crichton books in my time, two of which were great ( Jurassic Park and The Lost World), and two of which were either excessively annoying ( Sphere) or just plain dumb ( Timeline). As a diversion for Christmas and between semesters, I elected to read a few “out there” books, books that I find terribly interesting, but just normally do not have the time to read. A new expedition - along with Amy - is sent into the Congo where they enter a secret world, and the only way out may be through a horrifying death. But recently, her behavior has been erratic and her drawings match, with stunning accuracy, the brittle pages of a Portuguese print dating back to 1642. In San Francisco, primatologist Peter Elliot works with Amy, a gorilla with an extraordinary vocabulary of 620 signs, the most ever learned by a primate, and she likes to fingerpaint.
Ten thousand miles away, Karen Ross, the Congo Project Supervisor, watches a gruesome video transmission of the aftermath: a camp destroyed, tents crushed and torn, equipment scattered in the mud alongside dead bodies - all motionless except for one moving image - a grainy, dark, man-shaped blur. Deep in the African rain forest, near the legendary ruins of the Lost City of Zinj, an expedition of eight American geologists is mysteriously and brutally killed in a matter of minutes.
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