To suggest that The Da Vinci Code is a modern day publishing phenomenon is the grand champion of understatements! There can hardly be a reader of any nationality, any age or any reading persuasion who is not aware of a rough plot outline which is at once extraordinarily simple yet sweeping in scope and grandeur - nothing less than the continuing quest to find The Holy Grail! Jacques Saunière, the chief curator of the Louvre and grand-master of the centuries old secret society, The Priory of Sion, has been found brutally murdered. His grand-daughter, cryptologist Sophie Neveu, and author/symbologist, Robert Langdon, follow an exciting and ingenious trail of clues intended to direct them to the final resting place of the real grail, the remains of Mary Magdalene. Bezu Fache, captain of the Central Directorate Judicial Police, is hard on their heels throughout the novel, believing them guilty of this murder plus the gruesome slaying of the three second level senechaux of the Priory's command structure.
The Da Vinci Code is fictional! But its runaway popularity seems based on the controversial interpretation of the history of the grail and all the surrounding issues - the Priory of Sion, the Knights Templar, the Freemasons, the contention that the Roman Catholic Church has been aggressively suppressing the truth for two centuries, the role of Mary Magdalene in the life of Jesus Christ and the interpretation of religious symbolism in art and architecture. Are Brown's interpretations of his research accurate? Is the history of the suppression of this information by the Roman Catholic Church correct? I'll leave that judgment to people who are much more clever than I. Suffice it to say that Brown has an extraordinary ability to weave historical background completely seamlessly into his story and make it just as gripping and compelling as the murder mystery itself! Witness this brief excerpt on the suppression of women:
"The Catholic Inquisiton published the book that arguably could be called the most blood-soaked publication in human history. Malleus Maleficarum - or The Witches' Hammer - indoctrinated the world to `the dangers of freethinking women' and instructed the clergy how to locate, torture, and destroy them. Those deemed `witches' by the Church included all female scholars, priestesses, gypsies, mystics, nature lovers, herb gatherers, and any women 'suspiciously attuned to the natural world.' Midwives also were killed for their heretical practice of using medical knowledge to ease the pain of childbirth - a suffering, the Church claimed, that was God's rightful punishment for Eve's partaking of the Apple of Knowledge, thus giving birth to the idea of Original Sin. During three hundred years of witch hunts, the Church burned at the stake an astounding five million women."
The historical writing is exquisite! As a thriller, Brown has composed a taut, compelling, proverbial page-turner! And all that is accompanied by descriptive detail and character development that can stand proudly beside the output of any author that I'm familiar with. How about this description of the captain of CDJP?
"Captain Bezu Fache carried himself like an angry ox, with his wide shoulders thrown back and his chin tucked hard into his chest. His dark hair was slicked back with oil, accentuating an arrow-like widow's peak that divided his jutting brow and preceded him like the prow of a battleship. As he advanced, his dark eyes seemed to scorch the earth before him, radiating a fiery clarity that forecast his reputation for unblinking severity in all matters."
Unless you're a scholar and a medieval historian, don't try to judge it! Just go out and get a copy and read it!
Friday, October 07, 2005
Last of the Breed, by Louis L'amour, was a past recommendation of the Historical Favorites Yahoo reading group. I can't understand why anyone would have felt it should be classified as historical but, in any event, it was a thoroughly enjoyable read. Four stars with only a teeny quibble! Here's the review I posted on Amazon:
Major Joe "Mack" Makatozi, a full blooded Sioux and skilled experimental pilot is captured and sent to a top-secret prison camp in the depths of Siberia when his aircraft is forced down over a hostile cold war Russia. His escape over the wire and his flight into the hostile environment of winter Siberia triggers a nation wide manhunt spearheaded by the commandant of the camp, Colonel Arkady Zamatev (who is all too aware of the harsh "career-limiting" results of mistakes in Communist Russia) and Alekhin, a skilled and ruthless Yakut tracker who has never yet failed to reel in an escapee, more often dead than alive.
Initially confident that they can corral their man in short order, Zamatev and Alekhin fail to realize how quickly Mack's indomitable Sioux spirit, his lust for life and his astounding survival skills, learned during his upbringing as a Sioux warrior, will come to the surface and allow him to evade capture over a two year period. Hunting with a handmade bow and arrows, preparation of emergency camps, astonishing hair's breadth escapes, lethal traps set to confound the small army on his trail, construction of leather breeches and moccasins in the field, fire-starting, extreme cold weather survival skills, fording of rivers, cross-country navigation and much, much more are described with an exciting sense of realism and adventure that never falls into the trap of portraying Mack as invincible.
The ending is a grim one that is based on Mack's historical sense of native justice and retribution against his tormenter, Alekhin, and provides a very satisfying completion to Last of the Breed as a stand alone novel. But his sworn revenge against Zamatev and his relationship with Natalya Baronas, a Russian peasant he met in his flight to the Bering Strait remain open and unresolved. Sadly, the obvious plans for a sequel will never come to fruition as L'Amour has passed away.
Nay-sayers and detractors will point out that L'Amour ignored some pretty obvious tools that would have likely resulted in Mack's almost certain re-capture - dogs, infrared thermography and high resolution satellite imagery are three possibilities that come to mind immediately. But then we wouldn't have had a perfectly delightful, fast-paced, exciting adventure to read, would we? Detractors be damned - it was a great story! Read it, live a little and enjoy.
Major Joe "Mack" Makatozi, a full blooded Sioux and skilled experimental pilot is captured and sent to a top-secret prison camp in the depths of Siberia when his aircraft is forced down over a hostile cold war Russia. His escape over the wire and his flight into the hostile environment of winter Siberia triggers a nation wide manhunt spearheaded by the commandant of the camp, Colonel Arkady Zamatev (who is all too aware of the harsh "career-limiting" results of mistakes in Communist Russia) and Alekhin, a skilled and ruthless Yakut tracker who has never yet failed to reel in an escapee, more often dead than alive.
Initially confident that they can corral their man in short order, Zamatev and Alekhin fail to realize how quickly Mack's indomitable Sioux spirit, his lust for life and his astounding survival skills, learned during his upbringing as a Sioux warrior, will come to the surface and allow him to evade capture over a two year period. Hunting with a handmade bow and arrows, preparation of emergency camps, astonishing hair's breadth escapes, lethal traps set to confound the small army on his trail, construction of leather breeches and moccasins in the field, fire-starting, extreme cold weather survival skills, fording of rivers, cross-country navigation and much, much more are described with an exciting sense of realism and adventure that never falls into the trap of portraying Mack as invincible.
The ending is a grim one that is based on Mack's historical sense of native justice and retribution against his tormenter, Alekhin, and provides a very satisfying completion to Last of the Breed as a stand alone novel. But his sworn revenge against Zamatev and his relationship with Natalya Baronas, a Russian peasant he met in his flight to the Bering Strait remain open and unresolved. Sadly, the obvious plans for a sequel will never come to fruition as L'Amour has passed away.
Nay-sayers and detractors will point out that L'Amour ignored some pretty obvious tools that would have likely resulted in Mack's almost certain re-capture - dogs, infrared thermography and high resolution satellite imagery are three possibilities that come to mind immediately. But then we wouldn't have had a perfectly delightful, fast-paced, exciting adventure to read, would we? Detractors be damned - it was a great story! Read it, live a little and enjoy.
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
When I post a review to Amazon, I try to keep it upbeat and positive. On my own blog, I don't have to be quite so subdued. Golden Buddha was a piece of drivel that was truly awful! The number of times in my life that I put a book aside without finishing it can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Chalk up one more for that very small count. Here's the review:
How sad! I’m a Dirk Pitt fan from way, way back. For my money, Clive Cussler is a former heavyweight world champion in the thriller department! But in Golden Buddha, he’s reduced himself to the status of an overweight, out of shape punch drunk fighter that just doesn’t know when to hang up the gloves and retire!
As a musican and former guitar teacher I took personal insult at one point in the story! Cussler would have his readers believe it is possible for a collection of non-musician mercenaries to substitute themselves for a professional band, lip-synch three sets of rock music and fake the instrument playing sufficiently well to stand up to the scrutiny of a few hundred people in close proximity at a private party! Give your head a shake, Clive!
For Juan Cabrillo, the chairman of the Corporation, a collection of high-tech wizards and mercenaries, think Mr Phelps of former Mission Impossible fame! Monica Crabtree is a slutty version of Barbara Bain with boobs on steroids! If that comparison seems a little silly, keep it in mind when you try reading Golden Buddha if you feel like you’ve got a few hours to blow on something that just doesn’t make the grade! Some of the one liners will give you a wan smile or two but, frankly, I was generally uncertain as to whether Cussler was trying to be serious or trying to satirize himself and the thriller genre. It doesn’t matter – whichever one you believe it is - Cussler didn’t succeed anyway!
The thing that makes me angrier than anything else is that I’ve already purchased The Trojan Odyssey. I'll read it but unless Cussler pulls a real rabbit out of his hat, he’s off my list for good! Maybe I can persuade a second hand book store to give me a buck or two to take them off my hands.
How sad! I’m a Dirk Pitt fan from way, way back. For my money, Clive Cussler is a former heavyweight world champion in the thriller department! But in Golden Buddha, he’s reduced himself to the status of an overweight, out of shape punch drunk fighter that just doesn’t know when to hang up the gloves and retire!
As a musican and former guitar teacher I took personal insult at one point in the story! Cussler would have his readers believe it is possible for a collection of non-musician mercenaries to substitute themselves for a professional band, lip-synch three sets of rock music and fake the instrument playing sufficiently well to stand up to the scrutiny of a few hundred people in close proximity at a private party! Give your head a shake, Clive!
For Juan Cabrillo, the chairman of the Corporation, a collection of high-tech wizards and mercenaries, think Mr Phelps of former Mission Impossible fame! Monica Crabtree is a slutty version of Barbara Bain with boobs on steroids! If that comparison seems a little silly, keep it in mind when you try reading Golden Buddha if you feel like you’ve got a few hours to blow on something that just doesn’t make the grade! Some of the one liners will give you a wan smile or two but, frankly, I was generally uncertain as to whether Cussler was trying to be serious or trying to satirize himself and the thriller genre. It doesn’t matter – whichever one you believe it is - Cussler didn’t succeed anyway!
The thing that makes me angrier than anything else is that I’ve already purchased The Trojan Odyssey. I'll read it but unless Cussler pulls a real rabbit out of his hat, he’s off my list for good! Maybe I can persuade a second hand book store to give me a buck or two to take them off my hands.
Sunday, September 25, 2005
City, by Clifford D Simak, although written in a very easy to read style, was not a happy book to read. But, it is most certainly deserving of the moniker classic - 5 stars and 2 thumbs up! Here's the review I posted on Amazon:
City is a masterpiece of creative genius crafted in Simak's trademark soft-spoken, pastoral style - a breath of fresh air contrasted against today's hard-boiled, fast-paced and typically cynical style of writing. A series of loosely joined short stories is presented as the myths and legends that are told by dogs around their campfires to each other and their pups in a future so distant that no dog is actually certain that the creature Man ever really truly existed. From the standpoint of the reader, City represents a Michener or Rutherfurd style multi-generational family saga - a future history, in other words. Mankind, as represented by the Webster family and their robot, Jenkins, is seen as ascending to marvelous heights of technological achievement while evolving away from a traditional city style government, travelling to the stars and beyond, but ultimately descending into an agoraphobic, dystopian Spartan existence and disappearing into extinction. Jenkins - a ten thousand year old repository of flawless electronic memory and the only remaining human artifact - knows the true story of man's rise and fall but, acting in a fashion distinctly unlike anything Asimov might have attributed to a robot, keeps it to himself. Jenkins has concluded he owes canine society an opportunity to grow and flourish on its own unaware of the fact that dogs were once nothing more than pets to a mean-spirited and violent race of humans.
Although City contemplates a lonely ending to mankind as a species, hard core tech weenie sci-fi fans will rub their hands with glee as they read of Simak's imagination and prescience at work - automatic lawnmowers, atomic powered private planes, televisor ports, laboratories and manned bases on Venus, Jupiter and Pluto, an inter-stellar expedition to Alpha Centauri, the demise of natural farming fuelled in part by the rise of mass production hydroponics, ICBMs, inter-dimensional transportation, fireplaces reduced to an anachronistic self-indulgence, suspended animation called "The Sleep" as a psychologically gentler form of suicide, and, of course, thinking, sentient robots as servants and work mates.
To draw on a cosmological metaphor, the ending for man that Simak tells of is not the violent, catastrophic big crunch type ending that would see us wiped out in a blaze of glory. He rather talks of a much bleaker, almost unbearably sad ending to humanity as it simply disappears - the infinite boredom of heat death, as it were, as all motion ends and the universe reaches a boundless uniformity with the maximization of entropy. Simak is blistering in his criticism of man's arrogant opinion of his own place in the world, a theme he will return to again and again in such novels as Time is the Simplest Thing and Time and Again:
"But man had changed. He had lost the old knowledge and old skills. His mind had become a flaccid thing. He lived from one day to the next without any shining goal. But he still kept the old vices - the vices that had become virtues from his own viewpoint and raised him by his own bootstraps. He kept the unwavering belief that his was the only kind, the only life that mattered - the smug egoism that made him the self-appointed lord of all creation."
At once inspiring, frightening, un-nerving, depressing and yet touching, City is a classic that needs to be read by all true sci-fi fans.
The review is at http://tinyurl.com/8zbxh
Votes, comments and discussion always welcome!
City is a masterpiece of creative genius crafted in Simak's trademark soft-spoken, pastoral style - a breath of fresh air contrasted against today's hard-boiled, fast-paced and typically cynical style of writing. A series of loosely joined short stories is presented as the myths and legends that are told by dogs around their campfires to each other and their pups in a future so distant that no dog is actually certain that the creature Man ever really truly existed. From the standpoint of the reader, City represents a Michener or Rutherfurd style multi-generational family saga - a future history, in other words. Mankind, as represented by the Webster family and their robot, Jenkins, is seen as ascending to marvelous heights of technological achievement while evolving away from a traditional city style government, travelling to the stars and beyond, but ultimately descending into an agoraphobic, dystopian Spartan existence and disappearing into extinction. Jenkins - a ten thousand year old repository of flawless electronic memory and the only remaining human artifact - knows the true story of man's rise and fall but, acting in a fashion distinctly unlike anything Asimov might have attributed to a robot, keeps it to himself. Jenkins has concluded he owes canine society an opportunity to grow and flourish on its own unaware of the fact that dogs were once nothing more than pets to a mean-spirited and violent race of humans.
Although City contemplates a lonely ending to mankind as a species, hard core tech weenie sci-fi fans will rub their hands with glee as they read of Simak's imagination and prescience at work - automatic lawnmowers, atomic powered private planes, televisor ports, laboratories and manned bases on Venus, Jupiter and Pluto, an inter-stellar expedition to Alpha Centauri, the demise of natural farming fuelled in part by the rise of mass production hydroponics, ICBMs, inter-dimensional transportation, fireplaces reduced to an anachronistic self-indulgence, suspended animation called "The Sleep" as a psychologically gentler form of suicide, and, of course, thinking, sentient robots as servants and work mates.
To draw on a cosmological metaphor, the ending for man that Simak tells of is not the violent, catastrophic big crunch type ending that would see us wiped out in a blaze of glory. He rather talks of a much bleaker, almost unbearably sad ending to humanity as it simply disappears - the infinite boredom of heat death, as it were, as all motion ends and the universe reaches a boundless uniformity with the maximization of entropy. Simak is blistering in his criticism of man's arrogant opinion of his own place in the world, a theme he will return to again and again in such novels as Time is the Simplest Thing and Time and Again:
"But man had changed. He had lost the old knowledge and old skills. His mind had become a flaccid thing. He lived from one day to the next without any shining goal. But he still kept the old vices - the vices that had become virtues from his own viewpoint and raised him by his own bootstraps. He kept the unwavering belief that his was the only kind, the only life that mattered - the smug egoism that made him the self-appointed lord of all creation."
At once inspiring, frightening, un-nerving, depressing and yet touching, City is a classic that needs to be read by all true sci-fi fans.
The review is at http://tinyurl.com/8zbxh
Votes, comments and discussion always welcome!
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