Peter Kuznick, Professor of History and Director, Nuclear Studies Institute, American University, Washington, D. With large chunks of text seemingly lifted from his various sources and pasted into the novel it does confuse the narrative flow at regular intervals.

Presumably the narrative is cast in this format to give it the feel of a later report or documentary.

It is our intent and purpose to foster and encourage in-depth discussion about all things related to books, authors, genres, or publishing in a safe, supportive environment. The author goes as far as Guangzhou, China, from where the Congolese ship home computers, mobile phones and cheap clothing. After seeing how Hammond's arc ends in Jurassic Park, I feel like Ross deserves at least some kind of legal or moral comeuppance. Extended factual digressions explain that this particular type of diamond is very valuable as semiconductors, ‘important to microelectronics applications’, and since, as Crichton explains at length, the future is going to be all about faster and faster computing speeds, possession of a source of diamonds which speed up computer technology will be vastly valuable. In 2013, three friends set off on a journey that they had been told was impossible: the north-south crossing of the Congo River Basin, from Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, to Juba, in South Sudan.

The result, translated by Sam Garrett, is 650 impressive pages spanning 90,000 years – though most of them detailing events since 1850. But the family legacy didn't amount to much: a few African masks on the wall and a dog named Mbwa (the Swahili word for dog).True, Crichton's short-chaptered, constantly challenging smorgasbord approach doesn't quite disguise the lack of genuinely developed storytelling here, and one ends up feeling just slightly cheated: many of the provocative questions raised are never really resolved.

To prepare for writing the book, I planned to go to Africa to see gorillas on the slopes of the Virunga volcano chain in eastern Congo. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. As you might imagine, the resourceful ERTS team have snappy modern technology to foil the missiles and survive. The idea of a computer predicting to the minute when they would reach their Congo location seemed ludicrous to him.But they have a substantial start on us, at least twelve hours, since their aircraft is already forming up in Nairobi.

I've been a fan of Congo since I was a kid, and even though the movie gets a lot of hate I find it very entertaining. B. Travis, the head of ERTS, was fond of saying, the easiest way to obtain information was to steal it. Crichton cheerfully admits that Congo owes more than its exotic locale to Sir Henry Rider Haggard’s classic “King Solomon’s Mines”. There is, quite obviously, nothing about the internet, smart phones, social media or any of the other tech discoveries of the past 40 years. Fluent in English and French in addition to his native Dutch, and a student of the western Congo's lingua franca – Lingala – he has not only read through the library he intends to replace, he has dug up new archival material and draws on living memories.

But why would a comfortably placed American academic want to leave his cosy perch at the University of California at Berkeley to go on some cock and bull expedition into remote rainforest? 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. Hudson's interpretation is better, and I chose to imagine him in my head instead of Crichton's description. Crossing the Congo is an offbeat travelogue, a story of friendship and what it takes to complete a great journey against tremendous odds, and an intimate look into one of the world’s least-developed and most fragile states, told with humour and sensitivity.