Congo (1980; film 1995) weaves factual accounts of primate communication with humans into a fictional adventure tale about an aggressive species of gorilla. MICHAEL CRICHTON the author of the groundbreaking novels Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain, The Great Train Robbery, Disclosure, Prey, State of Fear, Sphere, Congo, Next and Micro among many others. Their success, as it unfolds in this lively narrative, reflects a unique combination of skills – an Army veteran of Afghanistan to deal with logistics, a doctor to look after medical issues and a photojournalist to set it down for the record in a splendid set of illustrations. Their presence produced a great deal of political strife, which I wanted to study by looking at France’s colonial past.

Rich with stories, his book included his own beautiful line drawings of gorillas and tantalising maps. Van Reybrouck checked if it would be possible that he was 126 years old and found that he knew the names of missionaries of those days and personally knew Simon Kimbangu, who was younger and born in a nearby village.

His sole link to his new world was a Congolese bank teller in New Haven, who connected him with her husband's brother in Kinshasa. But Ross not suffering any consequences, even serious legal ones, for her arc is just plain odd to me as a story choice. Crichton must have spent a while mulling over what could possibly motivate Prof Peter Elliott to leave his crib and in the end comes up with a plausible reason. Notable for its prescience and timelessness, this award-winning book by Pulitzer and Peabody winner Laurie Garrett is a must-read for infectious disease aficionados. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.

Moments of suspense, surprise, joy, anger and danger keep the daily round interesting … If you would like to know what is involved in crossing the vastness at the heart of the African continent with a couple of enterprising friends … you will find it here in all its mud-splattered glory. Forsaking the "posture of knowingness" in his engagement with his Congolese "family" – and with neighbours, street children, a warlord, supposed witches or girls hunting for a foreign provider – Sundaram provides insights into a society usually kept at an exotic remove of unbridgable "otherness". I admire the distinctive portrayal of Rachel, Adah, Leah, and Ruth May, their goals, and place in the world. Congo is, variously: Africa's Heart of Darkness; Stanley's most excruciating challenge; the Belgian king's privately owned colony; Lumumba's graveyard of hopes; Mobutu's "kleptocracy"; the strange kingdom of the Kabila dynasty; a site of massacres and rape; a place of "geological scandal", which has provided us, since the end of the 19th century, with "red rubber" for tyres ("blood rubber" as it's now often referred to), uranium for the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – and with copper and cobalt and, more recently, coltan for our PlayStations and mobile phones.Through imagination and teamwork — including building rafts and bridges, conducting makeshift surgery in the jungle and playing tribal politics — they got through. Over and over again, Peggy and her husband James Burton describe how God answered their prayers in difficult medical and life situations. 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 fingerpaint. Sundaram's first-person narrative goes a long way to illustrate just how significant one's vantage point is. Within ERTS, status was not measured by salary, title, the size of one's office, or the other usual corporate indicators of power.

Crichton gives us a number of digressions about the (patchy) history of Western exploration into the Congo jungle or up the Congo river (he is particularly fond of the expeditions of Henry Morton Stanley for the simple reason that Stanley was the great pioneer and explored further and more definitively than all previous explorers). 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).As from today, we're no longer your monkeys," were the words Patrice Lumumba spat in the coloniser's face on independence day in 1960. 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. It’s sweet that Crichton thinks ERTS’ technology is ‘staggering’ because it can acquire 16 new satellite images of the earth per hour (p. Karen Ross is at the Houston end in charge and she gets the techs to rotate the camera on its tripod, thus surveying the wreckage, then a dark shadow moves across the screen and the camera is smashed, signal ends. But it’s just one more element which triggers umpteen Crichtonian factual digressions, and which Crichton throws into the mix hoping something will stick.