Rating: 
Summary: Ivy league rationalist bummer
Review: Why is it Dan Brown's "religious" novels--technically inventive and well researched in the extreme--leave a mild distaste for some? Could it be that his not so hidden message is, "I believe in disbelief," as befits a preppie well ensconced in the Eastern liberal establishment? Remember that the best predictor of how you voted in the last Presidential election was how often you go to church, with propensity to vote Democratic inversely related to frequency of church attendance. The author's purpose seems to be to make people who go to Christian churches feel stupid, while paying the usual liberal obeisance to New Age and Eastern spirituality. This is unfortunate, as such false dichotmotization feeds the current perverse polarization of American politics that is excluding the middle most Americans would probably prefer to inhabit.
Rating: 
Summary: Expected more
Review: The book was 200 pages longer than the story required. The beginning is extremely slow and I almost gave up on the book. There were some nice unexpected plot twists but they were too little too late.
Rating: 
Summary: Too Intense to Put Down
Review: After reading the DaVinci Code, it was a quick decision to look for Angels and Demons. Dan Brown's research and imagination make for truly suspenseful can't-put-them down books. The Illuminati, a secret society dating back to the time of Galileo is believed to have died out until Leonardo Vetra is found murdered and branded with the sign of the Illuminati on his chest. The Director of the Cern Institute that employed Vetra and his daughter Vittoria, summons Robert Langdon to try to explain how Vetra could have been murdered and how his discovery of anti-matter could have been stollen. The story moves to Rome where the pope has died and a conclave to elect a new pope is about to begin. It appears that terrorists have planted the anti-matter beneath the Vatican and will destroy the city when the timer on the apparatus runs out. There seems to be no solution as Robert Langdon and Vittoria Vetra together race through Rome looking for clues to the whereabouts of the canister. The ending is a surprise and the suspense is tight to the last page.
Rating:
Summary: A good fight-against-time book
Review: As a thriller, is thrilling enough:fast paced, enthralling and whit a good plot twist and surprise in the end. Only, I wish our Author hasn't made his protagonist so naive. Maybe an anthropologist wouldn't know of the most cryptic aspect of particle physics, but his astonishment on hearing of antimatter seems absurd in a learned man. And has he never heard of CERN and particle accelerators? As if this stereotype of the humanist scholar totally oblivious of science matters was not annoying enough, there's an extravagant overemphatization of the rift between Science and Religion.Here seems to be an unbridgeable chasm, a situation that is rather different fron reality ( see the latest pronouncement of the Pope in the matter).
This said, it's a good thriller, whit carboard characters (how many post-feminism women-of-action way smartest that the male protagonist have you seen?) who don't do much in terms of human interaction,but,hey, they've got to save the world!
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding Book!
Review: This is one of the best books I've read this year. The research that went into the writing of this book must have been incredible. The plot kept you moving through the book and the historical information backing it all up was so interesting that I came away from reading it feeling smarter. I love when reading a book makes me feel like I've learned something that I knew nothing about before. Kudos to Dan Brown! I can't wait to read The Da'Vinci Code!
Rating:
Summary: A Book You Just Can't Put Down!
Review: I am a first-time Dan Brown reader, and I am a total fan! After self-inflicting a period of reading nothing(due to too much required school reading,) I have finally found an author I love! This book was riveting from beginning to end. I have always loved a good mystery/thriller, and Dan Brown delivers this! His protagonists are intelligent and three dimensional, and his plot is absolutely captivating. I picked up the book to read one chapter, and ended up reading half the book! Mr. Brown picked the Illuminati, a legendary group of men, as the central theme of the book. Along the way, you even learn some fascinating facts about the Vatican, art, and literature of the period. The story was very engaging and I have to admit I can't wait to read the Da Vinci Code!
Rating:
Summary: Nothing special
Review: I don't quite understand the big noise about this book, but I guess it's because of The Da Vinci Code, which I found very gimmicky. I just want to ask if authors masquerading as customers (like Victoria Taylor Murray) are going to write reviews that they please learn how to spell and construct sentences. I feel sorry for their poor editors.
Rating:
Summary: So Awesome!!
Review: I can't believe how great this book was. This is my first book by Dan Brown, and I'm sure it won't be my last. The plot just kept on getting better and better. I thought I would get bored with all the religion talk in the book, but it turned out to be extremely interesting. This is one of my favourite books now. A must read!!
Rating:
Summary: A breathless suspense!
Review: You know it's a good book when you are hunched over the book in the hospital waiting room and you find yourself holding your breath as you turn the pages while following Robert's chase in the Vatican City. In spite of all the monitors, people calling on the intercoms, and all the normal noises that comes with the hospitals, you are so engrossed in this book ~~ you just have to finish it before your curiousity ate you up. This is literally one book that you cannot put down. Dan Brown has shown his talents for suspense long before he wrote The Da Vinci Code ~~ this book is one. If you are a conspiracy bluff, this book is one that you should read. If you like to be engrossed with a novel, letting nothing interrupt you, this book is it. This is my second best mystery this summer (the first, obviously being The Da Vinci Code!) and I am definitely passing this one around! Robert Langdon is awakened in middle of the night by a strange phone call. Just a historian and professor at Harvard, he didn't think he could help with this murder of a prominent scientist. But once he got to Geneva, he was entangled in a mystery that got more interesting and intriguing by the moment. Joined by Vittoria, the scientist's daughter, they were in a race of time to save the Vatican City from an explosion. Along the way, Robert had to figure out the clues left in the city by artists centuries earlier in search of the Illuminatis that claims to be behind this latest fiasco. This book is enriched by details ~~ you find yourself looking up the art on the websites so you can visualize the clues that the Illuminatis left years ago. You find yourself holding your breath as every twist and turns have been taken in this journey. The last page is turned before you want it to ~~ you love the suspense and intrigue. It is just a fascinating and fun read. I cannot wait to read more of Dan Brown's work. He is the latest talent today and a really good find! I can't wait to read more of his books! 8-23-03
Rating:
Summary: Entertaining, flawed, but worth reading...even twice.
Review: If you're a fan of the Indiana Jones or James Bond type stories where the hero is continuously finding his way in and out of impossible situations, then you will probably enjoy this book. It's fast paced, while taking the time to provide a lot of detail. However, for me, the author stretches the limits of credibility a bit too far for this to be a great book. For example, as the story begins, the protagonist, Robert Langdon, receives a fax with a picture of a murdered man with a complex diagram burned into his chest by the murderer. The diagram is barely legible when viewing it in the ink-and-paper medium of the book, but we're expected to believe that Langdon is able to decipher this lettering while looking at a FAXED photo of the same diagram BURNED INTO A MAN'S CHEST! Has the author ever seen a photo that's been run through a fax? I can't imagine that this branding in the man's chest would even be legible if one were looking at him in person. Because of this, the book lost a lot of credibility with me from the very beginning. It continues with a string of implausible episodes that make for entertaining story telling, but take the plot way over the top. Much of it seems to be done just to sensationalize the plot, such as the fact that Langdon is mysteriously whisked away from his home in a supersonic aircraft (that goes "mach fifteen"!) of his own free will, even though he has no idea where he's going. I guess he had no other plans for the day, but he goes along a little too willingly. There are several other things in this book that spoiled it a bit for me. It could have been made much more believable, without sacrificing the quality of the story. For instance, there's one chapter where (MAJOR SPOILER COMING UP...) a bishop is found murdered. So what do the local authorities do when they find the body? Do they close off the crime scene and do an investigation? NO- THEY THROW HIS DEAD BODY IN THE TRUNK OF A CAR AND HAUL IT AWAY because they're trying to keep the media from finding out! In another chapter (spoiler #2...) Langdon is left in a helicopter that's about to explode. Somehow you know he's going to survive, even though he has no parachute... so he jumps out of the helicopter, then realizes he grabbed a piece of tarp on the way out (how convenient!). Of course, he's able to use the tarp as a parachute, even though the explosion of the helicopter caused the tarp to smolder as it opened into a chute above him. In another section of the book, Langdon finds a clue from the Bernini sculpture "The Ecstasy of St. Teresa" in which an angel holds a spear. Langdon supposedly looks to the direction that the spear is pointed to see where to go next, if I understand the author's description of this clue. However, anyone familiar with the sculpture can see that the actual spear points down towards the ground- not in any direction that would tell our hero where to go next. The majority of the plot has him following these obscure clues that remind one of the computer game "Myst". These are clues that seem a bit too far-fetched for anyone to be able to string them together under the kind of deadline that Landon is under (the entire story takes place in about 24 hours). However, he manages to do so, albeit too late much of the time. All through the story, the author is constantly reminding us that Langdon wears "Harris tweed" in order to stereotype him as a typical east-coast college professor. Okay, we get it- you don't need to tell us 5 or 6 times throughout the book that the guy wears tweed. The story doesn't leave time for allowing Langdon and his female co-star to get to know each other (they're too busy following clues to track down the villains). Their relationship advances in spite of the fact that they never really share anything personal with one another. In fact, we never really learn a lot about Langdon at all on a personal level, except for the fact that he had a bad experience as a child which gave him claustrophobia. Nevertheless, you just know all the way through the book that he's going to get the girl in the end. It would have been nice had the author taken the time to develop these two characters a bit more beyond a superficial level- it certainly would have made the reader care about them rather than simply following the action of two people trying to save the day from imminent doom. This book redeems itself quite a bit in the end, however (aside from the predictable romantic closure) with an ending that is a bit unexpected and will make you want to re-read some of the chapters, if not the entire book.
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