The Da Vinci Code

Rating:
Summary: Great Info!
Review: A book filled with great information! The plot is simply designed to parcel out all of this fascinating stuff!

Rating:
Summary: Hype not justified
Review: A book whose reach greatly exceeds its grasp. The implausibility of its baroque plot vies with that of its plodding characters. As with so many thrillers, it promises far more than it delivers, resolving itself in an anti-climatic puddle. In its favor, however, it does churn along at an impressive pace. As a fast summer read it works - and at least leaves you informed, if little the wiser.

Rating:
Summary: A great mystery novel not to be missed!!
Review: A book with some strange and alarming news about the last supper!! and a book that will keep you up throughout the night. The story revolves around a symbolist, who hails from Harvard, and who is invited to the louvre to meet the curator while he is in Paris. But before they meet the curator is attacked, and as he is dying, he leaves clues which he illustrates with his own blood for the police. Sure enough he writes the professors name, which is enough evidence to book him. Then comes Sophie Neveu, the curators granddaughter who happens to be a cryptologist; she believes in the professors innocence and together they set out to solve the Da Vinci Code. It's a great adventure, a real page-turner and I recommend it for sheer entertainment. Now if you're looking for a few other interesting titles that will keep you glued to your seat look no further than these, Buckland's Hot List: most creative, The Butterfly: A Fable (Singh); most engaging, The Alchemist (Coelho); most interesting, Life of Pi (Martel); most enlightening, 9-11 (Chomsky); most thrilling, The Lovely Bones: A Novel (Sebold); and finally, the most creative, engaging, interesting, enlightening and thrilling book of all, The Little Prince (Saint-Exupery). These are the books I'd recommend to my family, friends, students, and wife. There are many more, trust me, but these are the first that come to mind (for having left an impact slight or proud as it may be). If you have any questions, queries, or comments, or maybe even a title you think I should add to my list, please feel free to e-mail me. I'm always open to a good recommendation. Thanks for reading my brief but hopefully helpful review. Happy reading. Donald S. Buckland.

Rating:
Summary: too many blunders
Review: A commercial success and rather fun in its way, but marred by technical blunders that tend to tarnish the author's image as an art-historian at play. For example, the Louvre is east of the Tuileries, not "west" as Brown has it (page 17). That's Paris 101. Yet somehow Brown gets us to the Louvre anyway, where he tells us that it would take an "estimated five days" for "a visitor to properly appreciate the 65,300 pieces of art" there (page 18). Thus a visitor would have about three seconds to "properly appreciate" each work of art. Wow. Later, Brown tells us that a scroll is a codex (199), whereas a codex is precisely what a scroll is NOT. Brown-or his copy-editor-misspells "ad nauseam" not once but twice (169, 247), which suggests that somebody doesn't know his Latin-which is a little hard to understand in a book about church-history. Similarly, Brown misspells Armand Hammer's name (300), which is downright inexplicable given Hammer's importance as a collector. While such blunders as these may detract from the author's credibility, they are unlikely to cost him much when it comes to selling the film rights-which is presumably what this book is all about.

Rating:
Summary: Hardy Boys for adults
Review: A comparison of this novel with the Hardy Boys is meant to be descriptive, not pejorative. When I was 10 or 11 years old I used to love diving into a new Hardy Boys mystery and it was with some regret that when I reached the age of 13 the books no longer worked for me. (The regret lasted only until I discovered Science Fiction -Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Simak, Norton, etc.) Starting with the colourful cover, the Hardy Boys porovided action, mystery, suspense -these were juveniles succeeding in an adult world. My God, they could even drive! And imagine having a father who was a detective. I would lose myself for hours in their black and white world of smart, energetic teen-agers and bad guys with foreign accents and five o'clock shadows.

'The Da Vinci Code' is the second Dan Brown book I have read (I read 'Angels and Demons' last year.) Both books are packed with fascinating, little known facts and interesting, if far out, theories about intriguing subjects. The writing is clunky, even risible in places. The characters are one dimensional and absolutely cartoonish at times. The plot twists are outrageous, occasionally bordering on the ridiculous. The action is breakneck and nobody in a Dan Brown book seems to ever sleep. And yet it all works in its own way.

Here are some negatives that a potential reader might want to know about:

-paper-thin, cliched characters.
-barely readable writing style -I've never read a book where so many people 'chuckled' or where jaws were so prone to dropping.
-grandiose, Agatha Christie-like plot turns.
-loose, somewhat unsatisfying ending -perhaps setting things up for a sequel.

On the positive side:

-interesting, surprising facts about all sorts of things (e.g. Christ's divinity was voted upon at the First Council of Nicaea in 325 AD. Until then a majority of Christians thought of Christ as a divinely inspired prophet, but still a human being.) Brown stimulates thought on any number of intriguing topics. He challenges what you thought you knew while providing fascinating snippets of new information. Some of this information seems to be stretched and sensationalized at times, but I don't think there are any fabrications or any intent to mislead.
-well-described, exotic European buildings and locations. Brown is at his best describing ancient buildings and famous works of art.
-furious action and multiple points of view.
-there is no padding. Some writers would have dragged out this book for another 200 pages.
-there is violence but no gratuitous violence. There is no sex, gratuitous or otherwise, which I suppose could have also have been listed as a negative. Nevertheless it is refreshing to read a best-selling author who doesn't feel he has to put in a minimum quota of sex to fulfill a mundane expectation.
-reading 'The Da Vinci Code' makes you want to travel and see the art and locations described within.

Brwon speculates a lot, but with the topics under consideration there is a lot of room for speculation. Hard, uncontestable facts about early Christianity, the Templars, medieval secret societies, and the inner intrigues of the Catholic church are not easy to come by. Brown does his readers a service by questioning long accepted ideas and challenging one to re-examine what you thought you knew about the rise of Christianity. The idea that the Roman Empire didn't really fall but only morphed into the monolithic, imperialistic Catholic Church is not new (see P.K. Dick's 'Valis') but it is an important concept that deserves more consideration, and it will be a new idea to a lot of Brown's huge readership. The fact that the four gospels, which so many Christians take for the last word about events that happened 2000 years ago, were only a small fraction of what was extant at the time the 'authorized version' was approved about 1700 years ago will also be new to many readers (read 'The Unauthorized Version' by Robin Lane Fox), as will the role of the Catholic church in deliberately suppressing all points of view not in strict accordance with its rigid dogma. It wasn't just millions of people who were tortured, slaughtered, and erased from history when the Manichaeans, Gnostics, Bogomils, Cathars and so-called witches were wiped out, it was also ideas that were killed. Often the only way facts about some of these ideas, movements, and people can be reconstituted is by studying extant church polemics against them (see 'Encyclopedia of Heresies and Heretics' by Leonard George.)

While far from being a work of art, 'The Da Vinci Code' is a good bit of escapist fun which touches on important questions of history and theology, and I look forward to reading Brown's next book.

Rating:
Summary: The worst book I've read in a long time.
Review: A conspiracy/mystery story written in simplistic, episodic fiction. It's touted to be (according to the back cover) "an exhilarating brainy thriller." In fact, this book is simply horrible. The writing is as bland as anything I've ever read. The characters are as deep as a puddle of mud.

What's most disturbing are the factual inaccuracies, and this book is filled with them. It begins with the word "FACT," and then seems to imply that everything in the story is somehow based on fact. But it's not, and Brown gets even simple things like dates wrong. For example, the Dead Sea scrolls were found in 1947, not in "the 1950's" as one of Brown's character's claims. Another example: One of Brown's characters says that in the non-canonical Gospel of Philip, Jesus refers to Mary Magdalene as his "companion," which in the Aramaic language is synonymous with "wife." The problem, though, is that the Gospel of Philip was not written in Aramaic but in Greek. The same character, Teabing, says the vote at the Council of Nicea was "relatively close." Sure: 300 to 3.

An in-depth view of all the factual mistakes in this piece of trash can be found here: http://www.tektonics.org/davincicrude.htm, with another good resource here http://www.waynecoc.org/DaVinciCode.html.

The DaVinci Code is, in short, a waste of time. There is nothing good about the writing, and as far as the "facts" of the book go, about the only thing I would say is correct is the page numbering.

Rating:
Summary: Tripe
Review: A contrived story with weak characterization and laughable plot, salted with a number of pseudo historical factoids. For a much better novel with a similar theme may I recommend Wilton Barnhardt's "Gospel". If you are really serious and want to enjoy the prose of a true poet and classisist; look for and find the long out of print novel by Robert Graves, "King Jesus".

Rating:
Summary: The Da Vinci Load
Review: A convoluted and improbable plot, one-dimensional characters speaking in stilted run-on sentences, and turgid, repetitive descriptive passages characterize Dan Brown's best-seller, "The Da Vinci Code."
Compared to the work of more competent practitioners of the art of the globe-hopping action/adventure/mystery novel - Michael Crichton comes to mind - Brown's work is pedestrian and overwrought. Although prolix - the book is about 100 pages too long - the author fails to create adequate descriptions of people, or places, or objects. After 450 some pages, the reader still has gotten few clues about matters so basic as the physical appearance of the principal characters - other than hair color!
Descriptions of places - the Louvre, Westminster Abbey - are lifeless, and read as if written by one of the less gifted of Mr. Brown's former prep school students.
The success of the book must be attributed to the publisher's (Doubleday) unprecedented marketing effort - distributing 10,000 advance copies of the book to booksellers and the media, and putting Mr. Brown - who had never before sold more than a few thousand copies of his earlier efforts - on extended publicity road trips to trade shows and booksellers.
If you're looking for an intellectually challenging mystery story, reread Eco's "The Name of the Rose", or "Foucault's Pendulum". For more vivid descriptions of people and places and events in an atmosphere of mystery, read Crichton, or Ian Fleming - or even Tom Clancy!
For an example of how marketing hype can overcome critical judgment and influence popular taste, read "The Da Vinci Code".

Rating:
Summary: Why is Mona Smiling?
Review: A couple of years ago, a friend recommended Dan Brown's 'Angels & Demons' to me, which I read and thoroughly enjoyed. Because of that, 'Da Vinci Code' was a must read for me.
The story really gets started in the Louvre, with the mysterious and gruesome death of a curator, along with a secret post mortem message delivered via Mona Lisa. From here the adventure begins, and the reader is whisked on a whirlwind tour of Europe in an exciting quest to solve a mystery that has haunted generations.

I enjoyed the first half of the book tremendously. The plot moves quickly, keeping the reader engaged, and the characters are fairly well developed. The story line was, at times, a little over the top. But, hey, this is fiction, so why not?
In the second half of the book, Dan Brown seemed to lose the momentum he had built up. I didn't lose interest completely, but had definite moments of ennui. He wrapped up the story just in the nick of time. Overall, I really enjoyed the story, and definitely had developed a very strong interest in the history and myster of Mary Magdalene.
On a fun little side note, some time after finishing the book, I found this website (http://www.randomhouse.com/doubleday/davinci/) which provided a great afternoon's entertainment of mystery solving.

Rating:
Summary: Start Reading Now!
Review: A cryptic nailbitting masterpiece of the thriller genre - Dale Brown's words electrifies our interest and holds us to the very last word...a late night burner of a read.