Rating: 
Summary: Read the book. Don't wait for the movie. Or the tape.
Review: (This review refers to the ABRIDGED AudioBook read by Judith Ivey.)Some rare abridged audiobooks can capture the spirit and tone of a novel by cutting a great deal of literary chaff and leaving the listener with the meat of the story. This abridgment of Congo is not one of them. Nearly as lost as the plot's fabled city is Crichton's enjoyable and descriptive language. What the audience is left with feels like the comic book edition of the best-selling novel. WHAM! goes the introduction! ZOOM! to each next scene! Any subtlety Crichton had carefully placed in his words is left by the wayside in favor of actionactionaction. Judith Ivey has a silky reading voice and her narration is smooth... until she encounters any sort of accent... and Congo's got a wide variety of dialects. Her 'Texan' is poor, her 'British' is ridiculous (think Col. Critenden from Hogan's Heroes), her 'African' is insulting (some hybrid of staccato latino and mumbo-jungle), and her translation of Amy the gorilla's sign-language is just plain annoying (it almost sounded as if Ms. Ivey was plugging her OWN ears). I would highly recommend Ms. Ivey if she were reading a tale that took place primarily in the American Upper Midwest (or a teleprompter). Please read the book. Don't wait for the movie... or the tape.
Rating:
Summary: Two parts thriller, one part facts, no parts character..
Review: I have never read a Michael Crichton book before now. Congo is the first. I give it 2 stars...for story, as it was highly entertaining, enough so that I read all 310 pages in a day, something I don't normally do. But with this book it was easy. The story IS indeed interesting...a slaughtered Congo expedition team, a fragmented surveilance video giving enough evidence to suspect animal involvement, and a replacement team being sent in to gather facts, and complete the mission of the original team, along with an ASL speaking gorilla, Amy. The book takes many twists along the way, as the American team races against the 'Consortium' team, a German-Japanese spoiler troop coveting the same prize as the Americans. But the consortium is a 'phantom menace' in this novel, as the only threat is the one that we read about, they never actually 'appear' in the novel. Where the book fails is this: The characters are very two, if not one dimensional...save for Peter Elliot, the gorilla's trainer...and the gorilla, Amy. They provide not only comic relief, but a brief glimpse that the others in this novel are supposed to be actual humans. Karen Ross, the hot-headed, brilliant research team leader, Munro, the quasi-mercenary jungle guide, and the rest of the troop never, ever flesh out as characters, making them forgettable, and unsympathetic when danger hits the group...and the endless stream of facts and figures, that really have no bearing on the plot, which Crichton feels compelled to lace every chapter with. They neither drive the story along, nor illuminate anything about the characters really, and are merely filler. I found myself recognizing them early on, like a mention of the largest solar flare of 1979 in conjuction with a solar incident making a satellite connection impossible, and ultimately began to skip over entire paragraphs, or even pages of the book. It's not that I don't enjoy learning, but this is a thriller novel, not a textbook. Perhaps Crichton should write in both genres, as he apparently has enough subject matter in his mind for both. Again, this is an entertaining read, if not an indepth one. But having seen other translations of Crichton novels onto the big screen, I find that I am FAR more entertained by his work in that medium, rather than the written word.
Rating: 
Summary: A GREAT IDEA POORLY EXECUTED
Review: You can read all the other reviews and get the plot. Here's why the book's not so great. The first two thirds of the book are spent building up to an unsatisfying anti-climactic ending that seems rushed, as though it were an afterthought to all the scientific information in the book. Furthermore, there are no well-developed characters in this book, and you don't really end up caring about anybody but Amy the gorilla. In short, it's a book based on a great concept, but ends up lacking.
Rating: 
Summary: Congo
Review: I thought that the book Congo by Micheal Crichton was reaally good.It was adout that this boss sends a group of people into the
region of the Congo.He sends a person named Karen Ross to find one of the people who went to the Congo and got lost.Also to find a diamond what the other had to bring back.Also a person named Peter Elliot goes with his Gorrilla named Amy who knows sign language and with some other people.When they get there they find a lost city where these gorrillas live.Karen Ross thinks that the gorrillas might have killed one of the people who worked with her.The people then go back to lost city were they find a room filled with diamonds.Then the gorrillas show up and now they have to find a way.
I thought that Congo was a very interesting book.There were no boring parts in the book.I would recommand this book to teens up to adult.
Rating: 
Summary: I now have a phobea of Gorillas!
Review: Congo is a brilliant book with facinating theorys and wonderul descriptions. You follow Amy the gorilla, Peter Elliot and Karon Ross in suspence as they are hunted by gorillas and travel to the Lost City of Zinj. They discover the horrible secrets of the Lost City and use the strange new breed of gorrilas language to get back home. The story takes place in Congo at the Lost City of Zinj. It mostly keeps to life when it comes to gorillas, but it kind of strays into fantasy when it comes to breeding Gorillas and humans. Elliot studies gorillas and took in Amy a young age. He taught her sign language and she is now almost fluent. Elliot loves Amy, but can sometimes get impationt with her. Ross is very impationt with Amy, and is only interested in the crytle that the people of Zinj are said to have kept. Though she too is interested in the mystory of the City. Over all, the book is interesting and brilliant...
Rating:
Summary: Made me what I am today
Review: This book made me what I am today: a computer programmer. In 1980, I read Congo and, inspired by all the high-tech in it, set out for a computer career. After I read it, I wrote Michael Crichton and asked him if any of the technology in the book was real. A few months later, he wrote me a reply and said that the only real advanced tech he knew of was Japanese A.I. software for mountain-climbing. Once in a while, I like to re-read it. Yes, the technology is real today, but, that's what it's all about, isn't it? Predicting in a novel what will be. Just ask Mary Shelley.
Rating:
Summary: Peter loves Amy (so does everybody else)
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: A Good Read
Review: I thought Congo was a decent book- perhaps a bit too much technobabble and not enough of the gorillas, but it didn't detract from the story much. I wouldn't buy it but definitely check it out from the library.
Rating:
Summary: An outstanding and a serious page turner!
Review: I think this book was great, Micheal Crichton is a great author and he puts so much exitment in his books. I am really glad I read the Congo. The talking gorrila Amy was a big part of the story and she makes the story all the more better, and so does the Congo itself. I recomend This book for anyone who likes action and who especially likes gorrilas!
Rating:
Summary: Congo Book Review
Review: Congo is definetly one of Michael Crichtons best novels. I liked the book because the plot moves swiftly and the characters are developed well. A great deal of emotions and personalities are expressed in this novel. Some of the emotions are greed and fear. I also enjoyed Congo because the characters discussed technology extinsivly along with the logic and philosiphy of the other characters actions. The best part of this novel occured right before the climax. Karen Ross, a main character and the leader of the expidition they were on, was starting to put the puzzle together of where the diamonds that she sought were, and what hazards guarded them. Meanwhile Colonel Monroe, the expiditions guide, was trying to defend against future problems and keep Karen Ross out of trouble. When they found the carcuss fo a dead ape tha was previously uknown to man the pace of the book started to speed up and the bloody climax started. This novel also has a large collection of story elements. One of the many elements was the books theme. The theme went along with the thought that greed won't always cause weath but will often cause disaster. An example of this is when Karen Ross tries to blow up and abandound diamond mine to get to the diamonds. The result is that she dosen't get any diamonds and the unstable volcanic Mt. Mukenou explodes. Another aspect was the setting. The setting was in the remote and mostly unexplored by civalized man Congo rainforest. The setting supplies the fact that anything can happen and that even modern technology can concor nature.
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