Skip to main content
PBS logo
 
 

Book Review of The Curve of the World

The Curve of the World
reviewed on + 215 more book reviews


At last he stops. He's a couple of miles into the forest. There is no noise, no sound of anyone following, no helicopters, no shooting. His captors seemed to have resigned him to the forest . . .

So begins Lewis Burke's harrowing journey. After his plane makes an emergency landing in a remote area in the Congo basin and rebels seize the aircraft, Lewis, a New York businessman, flees into the rainforest. Suddenly he is lost in a world where no rules apply and with no apprent way out. As he struggles to survive in the unrelenting heat, battling thirst and hunger, he confronts his darkest fears and his greatest disappointments: his crumbling marriage, his distant relationship with his seven-year-old son, Shane; and the lack of meaning in his life.

When his wife, Helen, discovers that he has disappeard she makes the daring decision to search for him in Africa. As she and Shane trek upriver into the forbidding forest, Shane's visitors and dreams of his father give him hope. A military conflict is raging all around them as they look for Lewis. Lewis is eventually rescued by a young Congolese boy who takes him even deeper into the jungle and toward a side of himself that he thought he had lost.

This is a gripping adventure novel, for certain.