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Congo | 
 enlarge | Author: Michael Crichton
Publisher: Knopf
Category: Book
List Price: $25.00
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Rating:  246 reviews
Sales Rank: 507473
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1st trade ed
Pages: 348
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 8.8 x 6 x 1.5
ISBN: 0394513924
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780394513928
ASIN: 0394513924
Publication Date: October 12, 1980
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Dust Cover Missing. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More.
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Amazon.com Review
If you saw the 1995 film adaptation of this Crichton thriller, somebody owes you an apology. While you're waiting for that to happen, try reading the vastly more intelligent novel on which the movie was based. The broad lines of the plot remain the same: A research team deep in the jungle disappears after a mysterious and grisly gorilla attack. A subsequent team, including a sign-language-speaking simian named Amy, follows the original team's tracks only to be subjected to more mysterious and grisly gorilla attacks. If you can look past the breathless treatment of '80s technology, like voice-recognition software and 256K RAM modules (the book was written in 1980), you'll find the same smart use of science and edge-of-your-seat suspense shared by Crichton's other work. --Paul Hughes
Product Description
Scheduled for Memorial Day release, Congo, the latest adaptation of a Michael Crichton novel into film, promises to be one of the biggest movies of 1995. This action-packed, jungle adventure recounts the story of Amy, a gorilla who can speak English with the help a virtual reality glove. Full color throughout.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 241 more reviews...
The Most Entertaining Novel Since "Jurassic Park" October 19, 1999
17 out of 20 found this review 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.
 Peter loves Amy (so does everybody else) March 23, 2002
JLind555
8 out of 10 found this review 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.
 Wretched! August 7, 2000
5 out of 5 found this review 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._
Crichton ahead of official science yet again November 15, 2005
H.L. Preston (Colorado USA)
5 out of 6 found this review 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.
 Unintentionally Funny March 11, 1999
Sharon A. Hutchinson (Vineland, NJ United States)
4 out of 8 found this review helpful
As I was reading this ludicrous book, I actually burst out laughing at the description of the hybrid apes bashing people's heads using the implements as described in the book. Images of the 3 Stooges actually crept into my head. One of Crichton's worst; in fact, one of the worst books I have ever read in my life. I kept finding elements that were later to appear in Jurassic Park (the book), so it's almost like he was practicing in this one. The movie was a complete turkey; the best part is listening to Tim Curry's accent changing throughout the movie. Tim can do much better; he must have needed the money to agree to appear in that piece of garbage.....
I think the fact that you can now purchase this book for $.01 speaks more about how awful it really is then anything else I can add.
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