book review(s)

I'm attempting a book review in the spirit of bryan's movie reviews. sorta. i just finished reading dan brown's angels and demons. i'm afraid i didn't really think it was very good. while the action was interesting and fast paced, it didn't pull me in and make me believe it could be true - and that i'm afraid is vital to my enjoyment of a novel. once i come out of the "this could be true world" i start reading critically, noticing all kinds of little details or things that seems off. the idea that the motive for all these crimes/action was that the church and science are enemies and will do anything to crush each other just seemed a bit much for me. his statements that the church feels mortally threatened by the advances of science and that there is really no way the two can co-exist (i'm definitely paraphrasing here) were too extreme for me to find it believable. (i think i should add a post script here - or mid script - I realize that there are certainly groups of people in the church who feel this way, and certainly scientists who feel the same. But Brown's statements felt as though he was including all of christendom...that there may have been a few enlightened priests and church goers, but the church as a whole was overwhelmingly against science as a whole....hmmm - i thought i had bookmarked that quote, but i can't seem to find it right now. i'll have to reread the book sometime)2-12-05 of course, i may have been more wary of these kinds of statements because i took a class at seminary a couple weekends ago about his other book, the da vinci code. and of course anything a seminary is going to tell you is going to be opposing brown because he writes so negatively about the church. but i was most struck by brown's tactic of including a fact page - giving the appearance that his research has some credibility. but when you research those facts, historically speaking, they're bogus. like for instance the priory of sion - he says its a fact that it exists (and was established in 1099). and that documents proving that da vinci and others were grand masters of this organization were discovered in 1970something. he says this is fact - well...sorta. the actual words, gramatically put together are true i think. (i don't know that much about english grammar structure). the priory of sion did/does exist. but it wasn't established in 1099 (since that's set off in commas does it sorta exclude it from the sentence?) in 1095 a mothers and fathers of sion was established in jerusalem to try to convert jews. but no priory, and none with a militaristic bent. but the "priory of sion" and the documents that were discovered in 197something were created by a guy named Pierre Plantard - and the part he leaves out is that they were established to be fraudulent in a french court. Apparently some (modern day) guy named Pierre Plantard created them and hid them in research libraries. he got in trouble with the law when he included himself in jesus' geneology, insinuating that he was the rightful heir to the french throne (or something like that - again i'm paraphrasing). so he got taken to court and admitted he made it all up. supposedly the majority of europe would recognize this hoax pretty quickly. A lot of what he says is totally bogus - and i'm speaking strictly from the historical perspective. I haven't been able to find any scholarly people that back up much of anything he says. One guy does agree with some of his "historical information", but interestingly enough that guys another novelist. not a historian. he's the author of holy blood, holy grail, (the book brown got a lot of his ideas from). there's tons of other examples too that fit into his fact catagory (he says everything he writes about documents and rituals and other stuff is all true...this includes most if not all of the historical aspect of the novel.) anyway, the point is, i don't think brown is naive to this. he could have just left out the fact idea and it would just be a novel. but to say these are facts, when in actuality they aren't, seems intentionally misleading and like he has an agenda against "the church". so that's what i think.