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Summary: The DaVinci Code
Review: "Are you sure that you're going to finish a book this time?" I've heard many versions of this same question since my interest in Freemasonry first began by reading "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" over ten years ago. My wife is the first to remind me that out of my entire book collection, which is quite extensive, I rarely finish a book before becoming sidetracked by another. My library, like most who are on their quest for more light has become a hodgepodge of religion, philosophy, esoteric materials, Gnostic gospels, and volumes of Masonic works. Some fanciful, others, as near as I can tell, historically factual. Almost all, controversial to my family and friends. My library is an oddity to them, yet deeply personal to me, and last week I added yet another book to my every growing collection. I normally don't read novels. I enjoy the facts and generally feel that novels are a waste of good study time, however, as I was surfing Amazon.com one day a title grabbed my attention; "The DaVinci Code." Now...I just had to read the description, and am I glad that I did! Dan Brown is a superb author! He has spun a web of fiction on the bedrock of historical fact. The story centers around a leading Symbologist named Robert Langdon and the granddaughter of an elderly art museum curator Sophie Neveu. Sophie's grandfather is killed, and Sophie, a Cryptologist for French law enforcement, teams up with Robert Langdon, a Symbologist for Harvard University on a quest to find his killer, escape capture under false pretences, and discover the true hiding place of the Holy Grail! Quite honestly, this is one book that is difficult to set down and my wife was pleasantly surprised when I told her that I had finished The DaVinci Code. It was as if I had been thrust into this story with the characters! I lived every heart pounding minute. With heroes, villains, knights, maidens, secret societies, and ancient truths to boot, this is a real barn burner! The twists, turns, and energy put into this book will keep you turning the pages for more action and answers! Every free thinker should grab a copy of this book and indulge himself in a fact driven gem of fiction in pursuit of Truth. This book may challenge some people's preconceptions of history, but it will stretch your mind to new dimensions from which it will never return to its former state. This book is bound to thrust the reader onto a path of new discoveries. Don't just buy this book...Read it! Start reading early, grab a cup of coffee and a comfortable chair because once you start reading The DaVinci Code you'll have a difficult time setting it down!
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Summary: Sir Walter Scott he ain't
Review: "Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive" Sir Walter Scott. Perhaps if this silly novel had been a little more intricately woven it may have succeeded, but instead it is a poorly written and not-very-well disquised vehicle for Dan Brown to push some stale and often ridiculous conspiracy theories concerning the origins of the Catholic Church and the divinity of Christ. I am at a loss to understand why it is enjoying such success.
Although its "suppression of the sacred feminine" assertions appears to have struck a cord with some feminists, it strikes me as pandering and aggressively chavinistic. In other words, it feels like a book written to appeal to women's book groups. Some 3-4 star reviewers here are simply blowing it off as not-to-take-seriously harmless fun. ....okay, I guess so, but without the controversy this book is juvenile, serial mystery novel stuff and I left Nancy Drew behind in grade school. I suggest that you google "Dismantling the Da Vinci Code" on completion. It will add some interesting information to your book group discussion.
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Summary: code of conduct
Review: "The Da Vinci Code simply appeals to a culture that's increasingly skeptical of claims to religious truth," says Phillip Jenkins, professor of history and religious studies at Penn State University. "...a fundamental suspicion of traditional claims to authority, where they conflict with contemporary ideas and standards especially over sex and gender." Brown has written a permission slip, so to speak, for a wannabe libertine society. His assertions of accurate research and scholarship are suspect and in many cases preposterous. His claims concerning Leonardo's artwork are laughable. No serious art historian believes this stuff. He seems to have gleaned most of his information from sensational publications and from websites of disgruntled Catholics. Many of his ideas are out-right fabrication. I am not a Catholic apologist. I'm not even a Catholic and many wouldn't even consider me a Christian. If after reading this silly book, you find yourself wondering as to the truthfullness of the claims, do a little research on your own. You will probably find that even more entertaining than Brown's vastly inferior mystery novel
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Summary: A Case For John Grisham?
Review: "The Da Vinci Code" is a fast-paced page-turner. Though by adult literary standards, the book is fairly weak, it should serve as a great start for young people interested in the adventure of European history. I sincerely applaud that. Unfortunately Brown and his editors made the choice to preface the book with specific claims concerning "Fact" and "Accuracy." This was a strange decision. Mr. Brown's interpretations are his own business, but he is swearing that the basic facts on documents and art objects are correct. As has already been shown in "The New York Times" and others, this is unquestionably untrue. The book has more factual holes in it than a mound of Swiss (Secret Bank Account) Cheese. Are we then to assume that Mr. Brown and his publishers are simply incompetent, or were they knowingly dishonest. If someone sells me a painting they say is real but turns out to be a forgery, it is a crime. Here an author and publisher have made tens of millions of dollars peddling a book to millions of people, to a large degree because they claim it is based on controversial but accurate information. Now that much of that basic information is turning out to be false, isn't that a clear-cut case of fraud? No accusations here, just an honest question. I hold a MA degree from an Ivy League school and have lived in Europe for many years. I am concerned about how much deceit I see in American culture these days. I, for one, will be trying not to buy books from Doubleday in the future. I hope Mr. Brown continues to serve up his platters of fun for young people, but I hope very much that he and his publishers decide to retract their false claims to accuracy. Besides, my experience has been that the truth (or at least an honest attempt based on current research) about a number of the areas Brown touches on is much more interesting than the tired myths and legends he serves up here, albeit in a zippy new package.
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Summary: "The Da Vinci Code" is a Trojan Horse
Review: "The Da Vinci Code" is a Trojan horse. On the outside, it's a gripping murder mystery penned by Dan Brown, a masterful writer of fiction. On the inside, the reader can easily mistake speculative material for fact. Several points that Brown's characters endeavor to establish are not true or are at best speculation; among them: 1 - The divinity of Jesus Christ was determined by nothing more than a vote of fourth-century bishops at the Council of Nicaea.
2 - One of Brown's characters states: "Constantine commissioned and financed a new Bible, which omitted those gospels that spoke of Christ's human traits and embellished those gospels that made Him godlike. The earlier gospels were outlawed, gathered up, and burned."
3 - Jesus Christ was married to Mary Magdalene, and together they had children and established a "royal bloodline" that exists to this day. Brown's characters' present these assertions as fact; however, there is good reason to suspect they are far from the truth or just plain false. 1 - According to one of Brown's characters, the Council of Nicaea, held in 325 A.D., determined Jesus' divinity by merely voting on it (page 233). However, determining the divinity of Jesus Christ was not among the issues that prompted Constantine to assemble this Council. The Council was convened to discuss and evaluate a new perspective that sprang up within the church and endeavored to deny Jesus' deity. The Council ultimately affirmed a long-standing apostolic doctrine (that is, established truths and historical accounts that originated with actual eyewitnesses of Jesus' miracles over three centuries earlier). The Council overwhelmingly confirmed His deity based on a thorough evaluation of this new perspective in comparison to the eyewitness-based apostolic doctrines. 2 - Constantine did not select or omit different versions of the Gospels, as one of Brown's characters states (pages 231 and 234). He merely initiated the production of fifty new copies of the existing Bible to ensure more widespread distribution and use of it throughout the Roman Empire. The content of the Bible was already well established before Constantine's birth, evidenced by a list of nearly all of the New Testament books (including the names of the four Gospels or references thereto) found on the Muratorian Fragment, dated approximately 190 A.D., nearly a century before Constantine's birth. 3 - To support the proposition that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married, one of Brown's characters explains that this "royal bloodline" has been "chronicled in exhaustive detail by scores of historians." This character then refers another character (and at the same time, the reader) to a list of these historians' books (page 253), all of which actually exist. The "tome" among them, according to this character, is "Holy Blood, Holy Grail." However, one of the "historians" who wrote that book describes the book's material as something other than historical fact. Writing in "The Introduction to the Paperback Edition," one of the authors of "Holy Blood, Holy Grail," described the material upon which that book is based as "academically suspect" among historians. Describing the three authors' approach to writing the book, he states, "It was with a vision akin to that of the novelist that we created our book." And, "...unlike the professional historian, the novelist is accustomed to an approach such as ours. He is accustomed to synthesizing diverse material, to making connections more elusive than those explicitly preserved in documents. He recognizes that truth may not be confined only to recorded facts but often lies in more intangible domains-in cultural achievements, in myths, legends, and traditions; in the psychic life of both individuals and entire peoples." Note to the reader: this is one of the "historians" referred to by Brown's character. Brown packages these and other vast assertions made by his characters in an excellent murder mystery that is bursting at the seams with highly detailed and very interesting descriptions of myths, legends, religious and pagan symbols, numerology, cryptology, and every other "ology" that's out there. The sheer volume of these presumably accurate descriptions, and Brown's technique for cleverly weaving them into his gripping murder mystery, readily lulls the reader into accepting everything presented by his characters as fact. Just as the Trojans should have been in that mythological classic, readers of The Da Vinci Code should beware. There's great can't-put-it-down entertainment here, crafted by a gifted fiction writer; however, the perceptive reader will be wary of taking anything as fact without first checking credible sources for confirmation.
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Summary: Codes, conundrums, confusion and conflict!
Review: "The Da Vinci Code" is far removed from the proverbial whodunit, although who dunnit is certainly a central theme in the ensuing confusion and turmoil following the death of the Louvre's world-renowned curator. It is Robert Langdon who lives the conflict and deals with the confusion of imbedded art codes that are the crux of the plot's conundrum. Robert Langdon, also a renowned expert, is a symbologist who is implicated in the murder as his name plainly appears in a message left by the murder victim for his niece Sophie Neveu, a cryptologist with the French police. What follows is a whirlwind tour of some of England's and Scotland's famous churches, temples and chapels...all in the name of pursuing and deciphering the clever and encrypted messages left by the deceased. As Robert, and his accomplice Sophie Neveu, both attempt to clear their names as apparent partners in crime, they simultaneously pursue the clues left by Sophie's grandfather, a dignitary in a historically mysterious group, Opus Dei. To divulge too much is to spoil the whirlwind pursuit that sweeps the reader along. What can be divulged, however, is that Opus Dei devotees are worshippers of a religion in which the ancient goddess is a central part, in direct conflict with Sons of Sion, also a secret society that is slavishly devoted to the basic tenets of the Catholic Church, with no improvisations. Interesting and provocative art and church history unfold along with the parallel plot precipitated by "The Teacher". That's one of the closely-kept secrets! Who is The Teacher? Yes, it's a page turner. Agreed, it's a cannotputterdowner!
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Summary: A great book inspite of the masses
Review: "The Da Vinci Code" by Dan Brown Seldom am I influenced by the masses, but I couldn't help stumbling upon this novel all over the high school where I teach. Many of my fellow teachers had a copy as well as a large portion of the student body. My interest was peaked. I had to join the informal book club. The story revolved around a Harvard symbologist named Robert Langdon. While in Paris giving lectures, Langdon was inadvertently drawn inside a mystery of biblical proportions. Langdon immediately hooked up with a female French cryptologist and soon embarked on a quest to decipher clues/secrets protected by an ancient sect called the Priory of Sion (a faction boasting past members such as Sir Isaac Newton, Botticelli, Victor Hugo and of course Leonardo Da Vinci). The pacing, story and plot were phenomenal. What are your images of the Holy Grail? What do you think about the possibility of Jesus fathering a child to Mary Magdalene? What if this mythical child could have formed a continual bloodline from God, to Old Testament descendants (Moses, Noah, etc.), to Jesus, to members of society currently alive on Earth today? What if a female was meant to lead the first church in order to pave the way for Christianity? What if Da Vinci's painting of the "Last Supper" depicted a mystery dinner guest in addition to the disciples? Sacrilegious? Sure, this book will probably anger strict Catholics and members of the sect Opus Dei, but overall, the script doesn't trespass into Christian deity on too grand of a scale. Perhaps the most intriguing aspects of this novel dealt with its amazing (and interesting) depiction of mathematics (Fibonacci Sequence), art (Da Vinci) and cryptology. I loved the mathematics especially! Another strength of the novel is its use of real organizations and factual descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents and rituals. I guarantee that you will visit the Internet to check out Da Vinci's artwork (especially the "Mona Lisa" and the "Last Supper") upon reading pertinent plot points in this novel. Dan Brown is one of the most intelligent storytellers of this current era. Too bad he doesn't know how to develop characters real well. I never got to know what made Robert Langdon tick. If Mr. Brown improves this aspect of his storytelling, he will become the next must-read author for years to come. Look for the character of Robert Langdon to hit the multiplexes soon. My Grade A
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Summary: A Darn Good Mystery/Thriller
Review: <i>While in Paris on business, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon receives an urgent late-night phone call. The elderly curator of the Louvre has been murdered inside the museum, a baffling cipher found near the body. As Langdon and a gifted French cryptologist, Sophie Neveu, sort through the bizarre riddles, they are stunned to discover a trail of clues hidden in the works of Da Vinci...clues visible for all to see and yet ingeniously disguised by the painter.</i> ...And so begins the Holy Grail hunt from Paris to London and back again. My Mom often tells me to be careful what I read. She's afraid I'll be influenced by the dark side or sucked into beliefs that will send me to hell. Fortunately for me, my mind is not that weak. I have yet to read anything that has caused me to denounce God or not believe in His Son, Jesus. My faith is simple and not overcomplicated by the ravings of man. My advice to you while reading this book is to read it with entertainment in mind. THE DA VINCI CODE will probably offend some Christians because there is a mention of Jesus and Mary Magdalene being married, touching on THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST. Some Catholics will be offended because they are accused of suppressing other religions by turning their symbols into something evil, and trying to hide the truth of God, even going as far as to murder to protect the secret. Even though Leonardo Da Vinci painted such masterpieces as THE LAST SUPPER and VIRGIN ON THE ROCKS he often mocked the church and "painted Christian themes not as an expression of his own beliefs but rather as a commercial venture...a means of funding a lavish lifestyle". He also placed hidden symbols of paganism in his work. Believe it or not, I was a bit shocked by this discovery. I once thought Leonardo Da Vinci must have loved God a lot to paint such beautiful pictures! Now I'm not so sure, but only God knew Da Vinci's true heart, lest I should judge. I learned something about THE LAST SUPPER painting I didn't know and was quite fascinated by! I can't tell you what it was without giving too much of the novel away, but if you're the curious sort I am, you'll find yourself running to the dining room at two in the morning to see if your copy of the painting is the one done by Da Vinci. Mine wasn't, so I had to get Online and search for THE LAST SUPPER. Not only is THE DA VINCI CODE a darn good mystery/thriller, it's also a fascinating look at religious history. All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate. Dan Brown has done an excellent job striking the right balance between fact and fiction to make this an enthralling read. I found myself trying to break each code along with Robert and Sophia and laughing when they too came up with the same wrong answer I did.
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Summary: The Da Vinci Code
Review: "The Da Vinci Code" is about a man and a woman who meet at a murder scene and stumble across one of the biggest secrets in history. It is the secret of the Holy Grail. Throughout the novel these two must solve puzzles and work together brilliantly to solve this riddle that comes to them. Along the way they must beat a group of religious men to the Holy Grail.
This book had many amazing aspects thrown in. One of these was the puzzles and riddles that were in it. At the beginning of the novel both characters must solve a series of riddles and puzzles. The whole book is filled with amazing puzzles that must be solved to unlock the secret of the Holy Grail. These puzzles stretch your brain with thought. Another amazing aspect was they way it was told. The chapters were all short. The point of view usually switched from character to character every chapter. This gave a great variety of the characters and the problems they go through. One last amazing part of the story was what was actually in the story. Some parts of the book must have taken immense research. There is no way that the average person could write this. Dan Brown is a Genius, Brown for President. There were no bad parts of this book.
In Conclusion I would recommend this book to almost anyone. Any age from 5th grade up could read this book. It is an amazing novel and I guarantee it will be one of the best books you ever read. If you are currently reading another book, stick a bookmark in it, put it on your dresser, go get The Da Vinci Code, and begin reading. This book has priority over any book in the world right now.
Rating: 
Summary: No redeeming qualities whatsoever
Review: "The Da Vinci Code" is an incredibly bad book. It's badly plotted, the writing and dialogue are asinine beyond belief. It's the sort of book where the lead character burbles nonsensical, leaden exposition about the goddess figure in Medieval art to his accomplice as they're fleeing from the cops. Dan Brown isn't the first to rabbit on with this deathly boring claptrap about the Templars and Jesus and the Grail, etc., just the most recent. But neither he nor any of the other conspiracy-obsessed fools can tell us why, if the knowledge that these secret brotherhoods and societies possess is so "powerful", they're so impotent. If they actually knew anything, why don't they come out with and say it? And what difference would it make if yet another group came out with yet another religious theory? Throw it on the heap with the other 100,000,000 wacko theories about gods and messiahs and ressurections and Jesus and Vishnu and werewolves for all the difference it would make. "The Da Vinci Code" is nothing more than a shockingly bad airport novel. The fact that the author seems to take it seriously is no reason for anyone who actually cares about books and literature to do the same.
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