Rating: 
Summary: good luck Mr. Howard
Review: If Ron Howard (a director with an excellent reputation) attempts to make this pop culture novel into a movie, he is going to need a lot of luck. In order to make it appeal to the masses, it will be necessary to tone down the obvious anti-Catholic and anti-Christian agenda which drives the silly plot. Dan Brown's "research" which has been exposed as little more than of the urban legend variety, will be quickly dismissed by legitimate scholars. I suppose that could create the desired buzz, but I predict that the movie will be received much like Martin Scorcese's "Last Temptation of Christ," a movie that had a much more compelling story-line, but was not exactly a blockbuster. May I suggest a few options as a title for the movie: "Raider's of Intelligence," "Ron Howard and the Movie of Doom," or "Dan Brown and His Disceptive Crusade."
Rating:
Summary: A triumph of marketing
Review: I feel like the kid in "The Emperor's New Clothes." Remember that tale? An unscrupulous tailor cons a ruler into buying invisible clothes. Everyone's standing around cooing about how great the king looks in his stylish suit. Finally, a child cries out that His Highness is, in fact, naked. In this case, the con artist is Dan Brown. The product he's peddling isn't invisible, it's just bad. The story begins in a deserted museum, where an elderly curator is being stalked by a huge (are you ready for this?) albino. That's right, like in the movie with Chevy Chase and Goldie Hawn. But he isn't your ordinary evil albino. This one also has a mysterious accent! The rest of the chapter reads like that novel Snoopy keeps trying to write, "It was a dark and stormy night... ." The dialogue is painful. The bad guys say things like, "So, my pupil, tell me what I must know," and "When we possess the keystone, we will be only one step away." To paraphrase those guys on Mystery Science Theatre 3000, this is a book that has EVERYTHING -- completely wrong. Plot, character, art, history. If "The Da Vinci Code" were a movie (and Ron Howard has threatened to make it one) it would be a perfect target for Mike Nelson and his robot friends. Weirdly, some major media outlets have lauded the author for the depth of his research. Taste is subjective, but facts aren't. Because of the endorsements Brown has received, a lot of readers will trust the book when it says things like, "Jehovah" comes from a root word that harkens back to goddess worship. Actually, Jehovah is a mistranslation of an ancient Hebrew word that scholars today render as Yahweh, which means "I am that I am." Anyone who took a freshman course on Old Testament literature knows that. But Brown relentlessly mangles such facts in an effort to show that Jews and Christians are stupid, and that the Catholic leadership conspired to suppress the "sacred feminine." He goes on to declare that church doorways and halls are really secret architectural symbols of vaginas. Have you ever been trapped in a conversation with someone who turns everything into a phallus symbol? When you're in Brown's spiritual universe, you can't take a step without bumping your head on various parts of the female genitalia. If you want to read this book, don't waste your money. With 5 million copies out there, it should be easy to borrow one.
Rating: 
Summary: just disappointed
Review: I really, really, REALLY wanted to like this book. The premises and subject matter hit my sweet spot. I got sucked in for the first few chapters, then I started getting angry. Repetitive suspense about things I stopped caring about, and factoid paragraphs slammed into the middle of the story as if taken verbatim from a 3x5 note card. "Okay, I need to throw this scholarship in........HERE!" I'm really not that hard to please. But if I'm going to help an author get rich, for chrissake, I'd at least like him to take some care and try to weave a mildly intelligent tapastry with the story and the scholarship, as if he really, truly cared about real storytelling. I will say, though, that if every history professor took up their subject with the same spirit as Mr. Brown, every child would be a historian. But for stories, this just makes me want to run back and hunker down with my David James Duncan and John Kennedy Toole and Flannery O'Connor.
Rating:
Summary: mediocre page turner
Review: Yeah, this book keeps you going, and it's probably great for a long plane ride, but my god, do a better job with the writing and the characters! These characters are supposed to be solving the 'greatest secret of all time' and yet they are completely clueless. Some of the least imaginative writing to make the best seller lists. And just for perspective, I am not Christian and have no opinion on either side of the Jesus/Mary Magdalene debate. If you like conspiracy theories and secret societies, go read Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. Now THERE is a book!
Rating: 
Summary: Starts strong, ends with a thud,
Review: I was really excited by this book and it's subject matter when I first came across it at Amazon. After the first couple of chapters I was drawn in and could not put it down. However, after the initial excitement of learning about a new subject wore off I realized this book was actually very dull and predictable. I found myself reading just to get to the end. And a wholly unsatisfying end at that.
Rating:
Summary: It could have been a contender
Review: If only it didn't go to seed at the end. And if only the prose were better. And if only the sooper-dooper smart characters were actually sooper-dooper smart (at times they acted as if they were characters in a Teen Movie). Yes, thank goodness for Eco.
Rating: 
Summary: Draws heavily on the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail
Review:
Of COURSE it's fiction, but the research behind the story is impeccable, and it makes the story very plausible. The author, Dan Brown, draws heavily on the book, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln who spent more than a decade in researching the historical facts behind the story. I did some research of my own. The organizations named indeed exist or existed as claimed: the Prieur du Sion dates back to 1099, and whose grand masters included such luminaries as Leonardo Da Vinci and Isaac Newton--not exactly lightweights--and apparently one of the more modern (1885) leading figures was a priest named Berenger Sauniere, abbe at Rennes-le-Chateau (also the surname name of the murdered curator in the story), and was followed by the Knights Templar, the Ordre du Sion's military arm, (which was originally founded during the Crusades by Godfroi de Bouillon, who was named King of Jerusalem by the Pope, and was the leader of the first Crusade, AND who claimed to be a direct descendant of Jesus through Mary Magdalene; and the Opus Dei, which still exists at its headquarters at 243 Lexington Avenue in New York, exactly as stated by the author, and exactly as he described it.
The novel is obviously placed in the future, as the Pope is described as more liberal than the present pope, John II, and is his successor. The criticisms by present members of Opus Dei on their unofficial website qv:(Opus Dei: their unofficial homepage) quite apparently overlooked that fact in their criticism of The Ds Vinci Code. Actually, as the story unfolds, Opus Dei members involved fared quite well, and were certainly not maligned. This book has caused a firestorm of criticism, primarily from the orthodix Christian community who are outraged by the claim that Yeshua (better known by his Greek name: Jesus) and Mary of Bethany (better known as Mary Magdalene) were married, had a child, and whose bloodline is still extant today. This is a "heresy" that the Catholic church tried to stamp out by murdering 15,000 residents of Provence, on the Mediterranean coat of France; a crusade which the Vatican launched in 1209 and lasted a generation. That was followed by the Inquisition, which tortured and killed thousands more for their "heresy." These are historical facts, disputed by no one. This is a crackerjack of a tale, and it is little wonder that it ranks third in sales on Amazon (out of their over two million titles). To begin with, the curator of the Louvre, in Paris, is murdered and an American, Professor Langdon--an expert in religious symbology--becomes involved, as does the curator's granddaughter, who is a cryptographer. The two of them set out to solve, not only the crime, but the mystery of the Holy Grail. I prefer not to tell more of the plot. There are many surprises and unexpected twists in the story, but underlying it all is a generous history lesson that tells much about the early history of the Christian faith, much of it relating to the Gnostic Gospels which were found in the Egyptian desert near Nag Hammadi in 1945; the Roman Emperor Constantine and his part in suppressing most of the eighty some Gospels in favor of the four which were "blessed" by his scholars at the Council of Nicaea, and where the idea of the divinity of Jesus, the immaculate conception and the resurrection were given coinage by his "scholars". The Da Vinci Code certainly has an agenda: to give the legend of Mary Magdalene a wide audience, which it does in spades--and obviously, judging by its wide readership, it has achieved its purpose handsomely and quite plausibly. Those who most strongly ctiticize The Da Vinci Code obviously do not do so because of the writing, editing, or research. All of those functions are quite acceptable if not outstanding. So, their criticism is because the story undermines their own religious faith. An understandable reaction. But, this book is an education in itself. I have done a great deal of research myself in this area, and I can tell you that I admire Dan Brown's effort immensely. He has done well to bring, even if it is in fictional form, so much information
in such an assimilable form to so many people, most of whom will not have heard it before. Joseph (Joe) Pierre, author of The Road to Damascus: Our Journey Through Eternity
and other books
Rating: 
Summary: Intriguing, but with missteps
Review: I enjoyed this book until about halfway through. The writing is good, the suspense is maintained and the author has researched his conspiracy theories. But the writer lost all credibility with me, and insulted my intelligence as a reader, when the supposed academic-in-the-field-of-Holy-Grail-lore takes a look at some writing that will supposedly help reveal the location of the Grail. Langdon decides it must be a Semitic language with which he isn't familiar. Now, anyone with the most remote familiarity with Arabic or Hebrew script could tell you that it bears not the SLIGHTEST RESEMBLANCE TO SEMITIC SCRIPT OF ANY SORT. If Langdon had experience researching the Holy Grail, surely he would have at least SEEN things written in Hebrew and Aramaic. A cursory examination of the writing (say, 15 seconds) will make it obvious that it's actually inverted English. That's right, go hold it up to a mirror. Surely a professor and symbologist should be able to see this.
After that, it was more difficult to maintain the suspension of disbelief required for conspiracy theory novels.
Rating:
Summary: Exciting and educational
Review: This was a heart pounding thriller that had you thinking about religion, art, and important and interesting issues. Who cares if it's not 100% accurate? You'll learn more in the 80% that is accurate than if you didn't pick it up at all. I need to read something mellow after reading this book.
Rating:
Summary: The Debt to Umberto Eco
Review: Dan Brown must admire Umberto Eco. A lot. Museums late at night, Knights Templar, the "Secret", the professor pulled into a mystery wrapped in an enigma, a secretive Catholic society. Umberto did it better. But Dan's book is OK, however the prose is, um, easy to read. It read more like a move script outline to me than a book. He also presents LOTS of speculation as fact but that is the fun part - are these speculations in fact true? Are the Freemasons protecting a secret the Knights discovered while they drive around in gocarts wearing fez hats at a 4th of July parade? Or just hooey? Read Eco's Foucalt's Pendulum and really delve into multiple, head-spinning conspiracies head first. Conspiracies that dry up when discovered because of the twisted logic of the believers. (I'll reveal no more.) It has a much creepier atmosphere and writing that will make you smile.
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