Congo

De: Michael Crichton

Narrado por: Julia Whelan

Deep in the African rain forest, near the legendary ruins of the Lost City of Zinj, an expedition of eight American geologists are mysteriously and brutally killed in a matter of minutes.

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.

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 finger paint. 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…a drawing of an ancient lost city. 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.....

Congo was adapted to the screen and directed by Frank Marshall.

©1980 CrichtonSun LLC (P)2015 Brilliance Audio, Inc.

SLEEP WROTE

THAT'S A B8 PROBLEM
Written in 1980, Crichton was just getting his feet wet. This is a mass amount of facts and figures. While some of these tidbits of information are interesting, the book as a whole is lacking. No character development, with the exception of Amy the Gorilla. The story was not compelling. You want to skip this one.

Narrator killed it

I'm not rating the book as much as I'm rating the narrator. She had a ridiculously boring monotone voice and her Male voices were absolutely cringy. If this book had a breakdown narrator it would be so much better

Congo a very captivating adventure

This is the best experience I've ever had and this is truly something to be remembered.

It's no sphere

I love me some good context of what's happening but when the context doesn't help the conclusion in the end it comes across as filler. However there were moments that I loved where the story could go. In the end I was a little let down

Typical Crichton book

Eaters of the dead was awful and I wondered whether all the Crichton books that I read previously in my youth were just as bad. Congo was a significant improvement and more in line with my memories. Certainly not a great book and littered with technical jargon, but vastly improved from eaters of the dead.

Decent but challenging listen.

Not as suspenseful as I thought it would be but still good. I did not like the narrator and made it difficult to finish the book. Extremely bad male voicing.

A fun read.

overall the story was pretty fun. The characters and story were all memorable. Granted it's probably Chrighton's style to get into the science of it. But pausing for a 15 minute explanation of the Science mid climax kinda brought me out of it. It was good enough to bring me back in. Would recremmend.

Completely different than the movie!

Like Jurassic Park this novel is completely different than the movie. but in a good way, you'll not want to stop listening.

Too many lectures

Great book full of too many Minnie lectures. I've found this before in Crichton books. It's good too be educated by a book but this is overdone. Still a well written and interesting book. Worth a listen

Crichton Can Certainly Write a Thriller

Michael Crichton can certainly write a thriller. This time he’s focused on the Congo—one of the great “untamed” wildernesses left on the planet as we follow a corporate team’s attempt to find a legendary city and its blue diamond mines. The only things standing against them is the jungle itself, a civil war, cannibal natives, and a team from another corporation trying to beat them to the site. And, of course, whatever killed off their last team just as they were achieving success. It’s a thrilling journey made much more so by the inclusion of a naïve academic and his sign-language-capable gorilla, Amy. (Frankly, including the gorilla only barely (if you really flex your suspension of disbelief) made sense, but it’s so critical to the end of the story that you just have to forgive Crichton for this.)

Crichton uses an interesting narrative technique to add further tension to the story—that is, the whole novel is presented as an after the fact “report”. (I put that word in quotes because the novel reads like an exciting novel, not like a boring report.) This permits Crichton to inform the reader that the whole expedition is a disaster and to make little observations along the way that show where bad decisions and misconceptions led to the disaster. It’s a remarkable use of third person omniscient narration that keeps subtly increasing the threat.

All in all, this is another great story from Michael Crichton.