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Just Read It, DON'T Base Your Life On It! Oct 18, 2003 (261 of 288 found this helpful)
An excellent read, but it's truly SAD to think that some readers assume that Dan Brown's contrived history is factual and would even base their spiritual beliefs on a book of fiction. Just read some of the other reviews to see what I'm talking about. It reminds of the guy who watched too many episodes of Highlander and decided he was an immortal! (I'm not making this up.)
One reader compared Da Vinci Code to James BeauSeigneur's Christ Clone Trilogy and suggested that like BeauSeigneur, Brown should footnote all the factual material. While BeauSeigneur and Brown have a similar style and both deal with controversial religious topics, BeauSeigneur can footnote the facts in his fiction BECAUSE THEY ARE FACTS. Brown's "facts" cannot be footnoted because they are a fictitious as the rest of the book.
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LOVELY!!! No More Read & Internet Search for Pictures Nov 23, 2004 (306 of 340 found this helpful)
I've never been in Paris. I wasn't a DaVinci's fan and didn't know much about his works & paintings except Mona Lisa. When I picked up Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code to read, I did have a hard time to follow the Da Vinci's works and some sightseeings in Paris described in the book. Thus, I had my computer connected to Internet besides me to dig out different paintings and photos of what the book mentioned like Louvre, Pentacle, The Last Supper, Opus Dei Headquarters, etc. Luckily, The Da Vinci Code Special Illustrated Edition is just out.
I couldn't wait and purchased immediately regardless I have the regular hardcover edition of Da Vinci Code, which I plan to give it to one of my friends. This Special Illustrated Edition is not a cartoon or comic edition of Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code, nor it is an abridged version. It's a full original version embedded with over 126 colorful pictures & photos besides the text. It saves you lots of time & effort to search from Internet if you don't know how Château de Villette looks like, the overview map of the Louvre, and many other scenes, buildings, paintings mentioned in Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code. Overall, it's LOVELY!
Undoubtfully Dan Brown has done amazing jobs to his book "The Da Vinci Code". The story is powerful and magnificent. Mixing with a lot of traceable truth and facts, he made his novel sound extremely convincing and inevitably deluded you from what's real and what's fictional. However, please don't take it too serious, it's just a novel, not a research paper trying to make a breakthrough statement. Overall, the book has quite a lot of twists shocking you. Even the ending has double meanings. Make sure you read the Epilogue chapter, or you won't know where the Holy Grail rests that Dan Brown suggested as the poem below:
"The Holy Grail 'neath ancient Roslin waits.
The blade and chalice guarding o'er Her gates.
Adorned in masters' loving art, She lies.
She rests at last beneath the starry skies."
For people who love deciphering codes, Dan Brown wisely placed some codings on the regular hardcover edition's paper cover. If you pay attention you may find some bold fonts seemed appearing randomly. Link them up and you should see a hint to read.
(Reviewed by Otto Yuen, 21-Nov-2004)
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Factual, Fast, and Fun Apr 28, 2003 (304 of 363 found this helpful)
I was introduced to the books of author Dan Brown only three weeks ago, but have quickly absorbed all four of his published works. It is easy to see why some are comparing the work of Dan Brown and James BeauSeigneur (THE CHRIST CLONE TRILOGY). Both Brown and BeauSeigneur deal masterfully with the more mysterious features of religion, politics, and science. Both bring to light amazing bits of information, which they weave into the intricate patterns of their stories. Both are highly imaginative and write with a ring of authenticity that makes for a compelling read. While Brown compresses labyrinthine plots into brief time periods to provide page-turning suspense, BeauSeigneur trilogy is of epic proportion, covering several decades. While Brown applies the mysteries of history to the drama of "today," BeauSeigneur uses both history and prophecy (from perhaps a dozen major world religions) to transport the reader from the world of today, to the very dawning of a new age in a story reminiscent of the scope of Asimov's classic, FOUNDATION.
One other difference is that BeauSeigneur has taken the novel (pun intended and forgiveness is asked) approach of including footnotes in his books of fiction. By doing so, he all but eliminates the necessity of suspending disbelief. Few authors employ such strong factual grounding as to make footnotes useful, but I believe Brown's work (and his readers) would benefit from BeauSeigneur's innovation.
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Still Stirring Things Up... Nov 15, 2004 (148 of 175 found this helpful)
Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" is an interesting book for a number of reasons. It is entertaining yet essentially light reading. It is also filled with tantalizing bits of information about the history of Christianity and a miriad of other related topics including paganism, Gnosticism, The Knights Templar, art history, and the Holy Grail.
The most fascinating aspect of this novel is the overwhelming public interest and controversy surrounding many of the assertions Brown makes in this book. It may be safe to assume that most people have little or no previous exposure to these topics and it certainly has generated extreme controversy in Christian circles. There are no less than 20 books in print that attempt to support or refute the information found in "The Da Vinci Code". I have never seen such polarization over a work of fiction before. That said, this illustrated edition is just the kind of thing to not only make the reading experience more enjoyable and interesting, but to continue to stir things up by providing visual references for the works of art, architecture, and religious symbology discussed in the text. Here it is pretty hard to dispute some of the things Brown talks about when it is staring at you in living color. This would seem to give the book's many detractors more work to do also.
"The Da Vinci Code" is not great literature by any means, but it is entertaining nonetheless. I would recommend it especially for the simple fact that it presents ideas that make people think. This was obviously not the original intent of this work of fiction, but has turned out to be one of its strongest selling points.
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Serviceable Thriller, Atrocious History Jan 3, 2005 (157 of 188 found this helpful)
This is a pretty formulaic page turner, a fun quick read. Written at about the level of the average Nancy Drew mystery, it is best appreciated at that level. As far as the content, there are howlers on virtually every page (starting with the hero who looks like "Harrison Ford in Harris tweed" and is a "Professor of Religious Symbology at Harvard" -- good work if you can find it). You have to ignore very pulpy, cheesy writing to enjoy this romantic thriller.
Intended as a book that a dedicated reader could finish in a day, or something you take to the beach and casually finish in a weekend, "The Da Vinci Code" makes for a reasonable airline novel, so much so that it is often a bit clunky in its desire to ensure that no intellectual effort on the reader's part will be required. Here's a recurring example in this novel: a bit of unfamiliar terminology, say "crux gemmata" (jeweled cross) will will be explained on page N, then on page N+1, a character will finger his jeweled cross and explain, "Oh, yes -- this is a crux gemmata." I've read dinner menus that were more demanding on the reader. My wife and I both read about a third of it in a day, sharing the same copy, and that's a full work day plus taking care of kids, bedtime, etc. That's also a kind of virtue, I guess -- it's fast and peppy.
As far as history goes, Dan Brown apparently thinks that "most historians" give credence to the forgeries and frauds promoted in hoary best-sellers like "Holy Blood, Holy Grail." This author gets the best of both worlds: simultaneously claiming that "it's just fiction," while introducing the novel with claims that the historical record contained within is "fact." That claim is ridiculous. To pluck a random example, he spends some time talking about the Council of Nicaea, and incorrectly summarizes it as the origin of the doctrine of Christ's divinity by Constantine. He ignores the Arian controversy out of which it arose, which is like trying to explain the Treaty of Versailles without mentioning World War I. He ignores the documented fact, agreed upon even by the cheerleaders of the gnostics that he is sympathetic to, that the earliest gnostic doctrines held that Christ was *purely* God, and not really man -- the very reverse of the doctrine that serves as the lynchpin of his novel's intellectual base (such as it is). This is a bad novel for weak or misinformed Christians, but anyone familiar with history should spot the train wreck of Brown's ideas a mile off.
Oh yes, and in Brown's world, Opus Dei has shadowy assassin "monks" (in real life, Opus Dei is not a monastic order -- there are no Opus Dei monks, let alone trained assassins), and the Catholic Church has been promulgating known lies as its central dogmas, promotes violence throughout the world, and has been retarding the progress of science and knowledge for 2 millennia. Brown leaves the reader with the impression that this, too, is a matter of settled historical record. Oh, but then again, it's just fiction. Except when it's not.
In general, if you're looking for a heady thriller wrapped around Christian arcana, I'd recommend Umberto Eco's excellent "Name of the Rose," not this dumbed down, by-the-numbers novel.