Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #936 in Books
• Published on: 2001-07-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 624 pages

Customer Reviews

Very similar to The Davinci Code
As soon as I had read the first page of this book I wanted to put it down.... forever. It is identical to The Davinci Code. But I forced myself to read it and in time became hooked. Dan Brown obviously researches historical fact thoroughly. However, he lets himself down with the action sequences which are, in places, ridiculous. I won't give the story away but planes cannot travel at 15,000 miles per hour and people cannot survive falling out of a helicopter without a parachute 2 miles up in the air. Also the action is very cliched and at times you are left thinking not only would that not happen but people would simply not behave or react that way. This all adds up to a book of two sides. Dan Brown sucks you into a plausible, interesting and clever plot and the next it all becomes a little too silly. If you loved the Davinci Code then give it a try, otherwise you may as well forget it.

Breath-taking
Its all been said already - in my opinion the best STORY ive ever read. Yes the writing isnt world class, but the story and pace are like nothing ive ever read before, and i thought the ending was crazily out of this world.
For sheer fans of story telling, this cant be beaten. Yes it might stretch the imagination but the details, research and characters are amazing. In awe of the story - how on earth did he come up with the mother of all twists at the end?!!!!!!!!

like the clock that struck 13 ...
An entertaining read, though the last quarter gets tiresomely silly.

I would have admired Mr Brown's much-vaunted 'extensive research', and the ingenuity with which he constructs his plot around the topography of Rome (of which I am ignorant), except that in the one area in which I do know a little, he makes such astonishing errors that I cannot take seriously anything else he holds out as fact. Two examples:

1. Yoga, he says, is 'a Buddhist art'. No, it isn't. Its Hindu roots go back hundreds of years before the Buddha lived.

2. More astonishingly, our revered professor of symbology is of the opinion that Chritianity 'borrowed' the concept of the Eucharist (partaking of the body and blood of God) from the Aztecs. Now you can possibly argue that the origins of the eucharist lie in ancient Egypt, or maybe even the Roman cult of Mithras, but the Aztecs? Not only did Aztec culture flourish two continents and a fairly large ocean away from Jerusalem - it only arose about 1100 years after Christianity, by which time the Church had been celebrating the Eucharist, with full transubstatiational theology, for at least 800 years.

If Mr Brown can include errors so basic that 10 minutes on Wikipedia would correct them, what other howlers underlie his book? Of course it's fiction, but not as anchored in the real world as the author would have us believe.