First our heroes have to fight off the Kigani cannibals who were in the middle of eating the dead consortium members and resent being turfed out of the plane’s treasure trove. And when they do arrive at Zinj, where the rival team has been massacred, the ERTS team is soon under attack by this odd mutant killer-gorilla species—descendants of apes who were long ago trained to be ruthless guards of the diamond hoard. Good to see another chapter in the DRC’s tortured history probed … An intriguing, beautifully documented tale. 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. His skull had been crushed from the sides, the facial bones shattered, the face narrowed and elongated, the mouth open in an obscene yawn, the one remaining eye wide and bulging.

Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. The authenticity of the characters and storyline may help explain why the play went on to earn multiple awards, including a Pulitzer Prize for Drama. She was awakened to the atrocities there-millions dead, women raped and tortured daily, and children dying in shocking numbers. And then he heard the soft wheezing sound again, and this time he felt quite sure it was not a leopard. He notes that the rubber exploitation gave rise to "one of history's first major humanitarian campaigns", Congolese soldiers contributed to crucial victories in Africa in both World Wars, the Cold War in Africa started in Congo, as did the first major UN intervention, and that the civil wars "prompted the biggest and most costly peacekeeping mission ever.

A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. There is no doubt that Peter Elliot felt a personal threat in these developments, although not a threat to his safety.

But Ross not suffering any consequences, even serious legal ones, for her arc is just plain odd to me as a story choice. This was a refinement instituted three months earlier, after Travis learned that Army experiments with vocal cord surgery had altered voice characteristics precisely enough to false-positive Voiceident programs.The author doesn't fully trust his "bottom-up history", and lends the voiceless a voice laden with commentary ("Zizi Kabongo spoke about his country's history with great lucidity and finesse"). George Schaller’s pioneering popular Year of the Gorilla , set in Rwanda, is part history, travelogue, and accessible behavioral biology. According to this, the consortium will reach the Congo site a little after eight o’clock in the morning on June 21. It’s a long book – 150 years of history, addressed at a leisurely pace, takes up a lot of paper - but every chapter is a jewel.

Many of their missionary and African Christian friends were appallingly treated at this time and several lost their lives. Adam Day works at the UN and uses ideas from complexity science to both explain why the UN is so challenged in its ultimate mission to sustain peace, and what it should do to move in the right direction. It describes the history of the Democratic Republic of the Congo from the prehistory until the present, with the main focus on the period from the Belgian colonisation until the book's release. Crichton cheerfully admits that Congo owes more than its exotic locale to Sir Henry Rider Haggard’s classic “King Solomon’s Mines”. If this had been a Hammond Innes or Desmond Bagley novel, then this story in and of itself would have been enough, and people would have got killed, probably in gruesome circumstances and it would have felt desperate and tense.His previous books, also published by Hurst, are An Intimate War; Crossing the Congo; and Why We Fight. But none of this blizzard of factual information can prevent Congo from being preposterous bollocks. Van Reybrouck faithfully portrays a country which, like the Congo river cut off by rapids from both its source and the sea, impresses by its size and its power yet is truncated, bereft of a beginning and an end. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. The carvings appear to show the inhabitants mined extensively and seem to have trained gorillas to act as security and police (!