Rating: 
Summary: Bad Fiction, Bad History
Review: Welcome to the world of cardboard villains. Brown's idea of giving dimension to a character seems to be either having them switch allegiances without warning, or else giving them some sort of disabling condition, like albinism or walking on crutches. (Improbably, Brown's albino character seems to suffer none of the usual loss of visual acuity that accompanies that condition.)Our Junior Batmen are chasing after the Holy Grail, which in Brown's universe, shaped as it is by popular conspiracy-theory speculations rather than certified scholarship, is not the cup of Christ, but a "royal bloodline" composed of descendants of Jesus Christ and (who else?) Mary Magdalene. This theory has been promoted without success before, most notably in the 1983 book Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Henry Lincoln, and Richard Leigh (New York: Dell). That book has been soundly critiqued. Within Mary's tomb, our heroes are told, are all manner of secret documents whose contents will wreck Christianity as we know it. These recovered "truths" will pave the way for us to return to a more enlightened spirituality whose centerpiece is the feminized divine known from goddess worship. The idea that religion was originally matriarchal, or dominated by goddess worship, and later (under the Judeo-Christian dominance) changed to patriarchal monotheism (male dominated) is a myth. It is not true. There is no evidence that any significant religious movement had dominant female deities - they were always linked to their male counterparts, and usually in a subservient role. [See, for example, Tikva Frymer-Kensky's In the Wake of the Goddesses (New York: Ballantine Books, 1993) and Craig Hawkins' Goddess Worship, Witchcraft, and Neo-Paganism (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998).] The book is mostly spent in chasing after the location of this tomb, but in the end - too bad! - the book closes with the lead character finding the tomb and disclosing nothing, so we will never know whether Mary Magdalene's crypt contained a secret new Gospel or Judas Iscariot's grocery list. One the first things a reader of The DaVinci Code will see, in prefatory material and under a heading in bolded, capital letters, reading "FACT", is this statement: "All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate." In terms of documents and rituals, however - and even artwork and architecture -- The DaVinci Code contains few "facts" and what few it does contain require serious qualification. All of this might be excused, except that Brown baptizes such aspects of the book with the brand of FACT, and that he also puts many of these "facts" into the mouth of a character named Teabing who is described as a reputable historian. I rather think if any genuine, academic historian made certain statements attributed to Teabing, he would be promptly demoted to janitorial duties and remanded for training in History 101. Sadly, Brown's sleight-of-hand under the cloak of fact has tricked others, including the Book Review Editor of the New York Daily News, who commented naively that "his research is impeccable." I found a very thorough examination of the bogus items presented as "facts" in this book here:
http://tektonics.org/davincicrude.htm
Rating: 
Summary: SURPRISING IN EVERY WAY
Review: Well after finishing the book, a mere ten minutes ago, I am riveted. The only reading that I'm displeased with is what some, not all, but some of the other people have to say here on Amazon. If you were to ask me, there would be absolutely wrong with making up a bit of history to suit your readers. I have no idea as to whether Dan Brown has actually done this, but if he has, one must understand that this IS a work of fiction. I haven't heard one squabble over how Harry Potter doesn't have enough facts in...and why is this?...because it to is fiction. My honest advice, begin to read this book and then see if you can stop. I read the sample chapter online, bought the book the next day, and today, five days later, all 454 pages are complete. Ignore those who are obviously ignorant to a good novel, this is THE thriller of the year. This book would get 6 stars, but Amazon will only let me put 5 for now.
Rating: 
Summary: Very entertaining, but the seams are showing
Review: Well worth it now if you can borrow it; otherwise wait for paper. Readable because the ideas are interesting and well presented, but the characters are sketchy and the author's style lacks polish.
Rating: 
Summary: Great plot
Review: Well written, real page turner, great plot, I learned a lot about church history . Enjoyable. However, the intricacies of all the puzzles were a bit much and sort of implausable. The characters educating each other during pretty stressful times just didn't ring true. Also, the story depends a lot on happennings that could have just as easily not happenned and sent the story off track.
Rating: 
Summary: Fast paced pap
Review: Well! Dan Brown sure has written a successful book, hasn't he? Best seller for many weeks. This book is eye candy. Discerning readers among you, you know what I mean. I read it in a day.
But don't kid yourself. This book isn't researched, or in any way accurate in the details. It's a plot spun, interestingly enough, around little kernels of sketchy 'information'. Just FORGET about Constantine's role in the canonization of Scripture! Dan Brown should be ashamed of himself for suggesting he's done good research. Now if you want to read a better source for all of this, I suggest books like Holy Blood, Holy Grail or The Woman with the Alabaster Jar, or better, The Feminine Face of God.
Rating:
Summary: Oops--I believed all the hype!
Review: Well, I finally gave in and read this book for one of my book clubs, and was extremely disappointed. It was a ridiculous Hollywood script from beginning to end! The only reason I gave it two stars is because it did ignite one of the most interesting discussions I've had in a book club. But in the end, we all agreed that the book came nowhere near to living up to the hype!
Rating:
Summary: Anti-Christian Agenda Driven
Review: Well, I just couldn't go on with this book. I figured the author had some anti-Christian leanings when he mentioned how the church killed some five million 'witches' way back when - which is, I'm pretty sure, way off. But, the book already had my interest, so I just thought I would enjoy the rest of it for entertainment's sake. But when, just over half way through the book, I was expected to swallow that the divinity of Christ was never part of the early church's beliefs, but was invented by Constantine, four centuries after Christ, for purely political reasons, I felt sick. Oh, yes, he had the Councel of Nicea convene, canonize the Bible according to his wishes (leaving out all those other books - 58 other gospels, no less - that proved Jesus was just a man). Oh, they also decided to make Jesus God at this convention. Constantine needed this, you see, for population manipulation purposes, of course - and this forms the foundation of Christianity today. "You mean the divinity of Christ was decided on by a vote?" -"Yes, and a very close vote at that", the scholarly characters of the book ensure us. The dizzied woman gives the trusted scholar a look of shocked wonder. He replies with a gental nod on confirmation. It's Puke-O-Rama time, everybody! Okay, at this point I can see the author is basically making an attempt to debunk and discredit Christianity - the whole point of the book. I felt violated. He could have at least have shown some respect for historical facts. You think he would have figured that some people, believers and non-believers alike, have actually looked these things up.
Rating:
Summary: Arrrrrrrgh!
Review: Well, I must be an army of one, but this is the most wretchedly written book it's been my misfortune to encounter in many a long day. I'm a lifelong mystery and thriller afficionado, and it's rare that such an interesting concept has been presented in such a banal, pedestrian, stultifying, and often ridiculous style. Phooey. . . . but many others have loved it, so . . .
Rating:
Summary: HOLY BLOOD, HOLY GRAIL, HOLY COW
Review: Well, it's interesting to see by his remarkable new bestseller, THE DA VINCI CODE, that author Dan Brown has been reading many of the same books I have. Not sure if I should congratulate or pity. In 1984, I bought my first copy of Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln's controversial and much maligned HOLY BLOOD, HOLY GRAIL, a veritable Pandora's box of secret societies, heretical orders, medieval murder and intrigue involving (supposedly) an astonishing array of some of the greatest artists and thinkers in Occidental history. Aside from some particularly sensational claims, the book did host an impressive measure of very scholarly research into certain shadowy avenues of history I had few ideas about. I was, in a word, hooked. In the years since then, along with my regular diet of novels and mainstream nonfiction, I consumed a good deal of HOLY BLOOD spin-offs. Too many, really; a few were quite fun, but most were just strange and preposterous crackpot pseudo-histories. Like the flying saucers of the fifties and sixties, suddenly the whole of ancient and classical Christendom was somehow encoded with one great secret message after another, and amateur symbologists and geometers were having an endless field day. Never naive enough to become disillusioned in any real sense, still I was disappointed that more serious research wasn't being done, but it seemed the whole tainted business had become anathema to the powers that be in our present-world academia.
Dan Brown is, undeniably, well read in this area. What he lacks in prose style--which is considerable--he almost makes up for in his use of all this anecdotal history, this mudslide of minutiae, a manic, relentless assault upon the reader. I can only imagine how this all might affect someone who has never read of or heard any of these theories before.
If, as a fiction writer, Brown has mastered anything, it's the trick of the twist, unexpected turns of events stacked so densely one atop the other here as to be mind-numbingly humorous. Reading DA VINCI, I thought of nothing more than old James Bond movies--then it occurred to me how Oliver Stone had done much the same thing with his movie JFK. Recipe being, you get yourself a juicy conspiracy, gather together every known crumb of theory and leftover tale concerning it, throw in a few more or less interesting characters (the wooden variety will do just fine; no time to waste), sprinkle in a few exotic, historically drenched locales, stir and heat to a rolling boil until the lid goes through the roof.
If the function of art is to arrest the mind, Dan Brown succeeds only in testing it. And if the pace of his novel were not so astonishingly quick, he would succeed also in trying our patience. He seems to be betting all along on a sure hand of keeping one step ahead of the reader and in that I'm quite sure he has not failed himself.
Rating:
Summary: Not such a hot book
Review: Well, two of my friends insisted I read this book, so I did. I've read better books, although I did finish it. I guess the 'rapid fire' and 'action-packed' etc, etc, nature of the book got to me, it all seems a bit pat, i.e. the right things just keep happening to these two rather flat characters. It would be a good airplane book, the kind you could read and follow with a huge jet engine roaring outside your window. I haven't reviewed a book that had 1200 other Amazon reviews, and I see huge piles of this book in the brick-and-mortar stores, so I am probably in the minority on this one.
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