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.

In particular he keeps writing that ‘many months later Peter Elliott realised his mistake’ or ‘speaking later, Karen Ross explained why she made this decision’. The Belgian author is best known for creating the detective Maigret, but he turned his pen to satire with devastating effect in these short stories, attacking the pettifogging bureaucrats who kept the crumbling colonial edifice of the Belgian Congo going. A leper colony halfway up the Congo near the town of Mbandaka was Greene's choice and the resulting fiction tells of a troubled individual - this time an architect - seeking time away from life's pressures by escaping to a remote medical station.By rejecting non-essential cookies, Reddit may still use certain cookies to ensure the proper functionality of our platform. I'm a professor at Columbia, a social psychologist who has studied, taught, and written about conflict for decades.

Lynn Nottage’s beautiful, hideous and unpretentiously important play [is] a shattering, intimate journey into faraway news reports. Or could this be an example of genetic memory (cue a Crichtonian digression about the history and provenance of genetic memory, ‘Genetic memory was first proposed by Marais in 1911…’ p.

She emerged into a small square room with a ceiling video monitor, and faced the unmarked outer door of the Communications Control Room.

There have been a number of civil wars in the region known as the Congo including the massive Second Congo War (1998 to 2003). Earth Resources Technology Services Inc (ERTS) is a Houston-based American corporation devoted to locating and extracting rare and precious minerals and resources for industrial use. 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. I don’t mean to be rude but when two leads in what is meant to be a serious thriller played defining parts in Ghostbusters (Hudson) and The Rocky Horror Show (Curry) you know you’re talking about a turkey.Deep in the African rain forest, near the legendary ruins of the Lost City of Zinj, an expedition of eight American geologists is mysteriously and brutally killed in a matter of minutes. Ten thousand miles away, in the cold windowless main data room of Earth Resources Technology Services, Inc.