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The Lost Symbol Dan Brown Books

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The Lost Symbol Dan Brown Books

So here's the deal: plotting (A), characters (C), setting (C), plausibility (D), description (C+), set pieces (A), theme (C). The Lost Symbol is conventional Dan Brown--a mystery to be solved by Robert Langdon, in the company of a woman, while he conjures with a bad guy and is being chased by a government agency. The mystery involves symbology, numerology, the doings of a secret society and first and last things (i.e. faith, religion, the nature of reality, the cosmos, etc.).

Comparisons with Angels and Demons and The DaVinci Code are inevitable, because Brown has created a franchise designed to produce a reliable product. This installment--The Lost Symbol--concerns freemasonry in Washington, D.C. A mentor of Langdon's has been taken against his will. Langdon partners with the mentor's sister to satisfy the demands of the mentor's captor and simultaneously reconstruct a pyramid, find a place and determine the key to wisdom that will facilitate the apotheosis of mankind.

The bad guy's name is Moloch (we [and Milton] would spell it that way); he's covered in tattoos, takes steroids, has castrated himself and likes to look at himself in the mirror nude as well as kill members of Langdon's mentor's family. The CIA director hot on Langdon's trail is short, female, and Japanese. A heavy smoker, she has yellowed teeth and a moustache. The mentor, Peter Solomon, is a 33rd degree mason/billionaire; his sister has a lab in which she is doing `noetic science', studying the ways in which mind affects matter. No one has ever told Brown that less can sometimes be more.

In the course of Langdon's race against time we get a tour of Washington, a city whose details Langdon knows much better than Brown, whose designation of neighborhoods and time/distance travel estimates will be seen as flawed by local residents. The compensation for this shortcoming may be the set pieces in which Brown plays out the details of numerology, myth and symbology. These are sometimes very impressive and very clever.

The major problem with the book, in my opinion, is the theme. It lacks the specificity of The DaVinci Code, a book with a theme that has been the subject of scholarship, a subject that concerns an essential issue in Catholicism, a subject that is controversial and engaging. The subject of The Lost Symbol is much more diffuse. For many it will be much less engaging. Most (or at least many) will quickly figure out the site which Langdon is laboring to find and most will be disappointed by what he finds there, not because it is unimportant but because it is sufficiently `common' that one wonders why all the masons in the book are trying to protect it at great personal cost. In short, the climax is anticlimactic in the extreme and it is followed by page after page of discourse which many readers will find preachy.

Having said all that, the book will still hold most readers' attention; with the Amazon discount they will not feel that they have wasted their money and they will look forward to Dan Brown's next book.


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The Lost Symbol Dan Brown Books Reviews

Brown doesn’t raise the bet this time around. He’s been holding a good hand and is playing it safe. Rather than flash his ace, Robert Langdon, he lets the other cards in the deck move the game along. For much of the action, Langdon resembles a joker rather than the ace. Still entertaining to follow the flow of the other players. Brown keeps some of his cards close to his vest and provides a twist or two towards the end of the game. The pot is still a battle between science and religion and some good research is the ante that keeps the game interesting. Readers should not fold their cards before the last hand is played.
The text and binding is great on this edition but it doesn't have the illustrations/photos like the other books do. That's the whole point of me purchasing the illustrated edition so I wouldn't be stopping every minute to look up a venue or artifact.
Does Brown have an editor anymore or has his success allowed him to write anything? I suspect the latter. This book is tedious, overwrought and full of crap to be blunt. Noetic Science is junk science. Masonic conspiracies are overblown. National crisis, I think not. On by the way, the CIA by law is prohibited from operating domestically. The head of the CIA Office of Security has NO jurisdiction! Not to mention she was basically modeled on Edna from the Incredibles. The antagonists real identity is obvious half way through. The whole book could lose 100 pages easily. It repeats the same quasi-philosophical crap 3x times. Lastly, the updated 21 grams experiment made me laugh out loud. Thoughts dont have mass, random number generators didnt sync up, world consciousness isnt a thing etc.
It's kind of hard to write a review about a book of fiction without giving away too much of the story itself, but let me give it a try. I read the version of this book, so I know that some other reviewers have pointed out how the print version was over 600 pages long. I read the book over several sittings, but I didn't feel the weight of 600 pages as the book is fairly well paced with very short chapters. What I liked about the book was that it kept me entertained for the most part. What I disliked about the book was the climax, which included the origin of Mal'akh (the antagonist). That and pretty much the rest of the book from there just didn't work for me. After having the origin Mal'akh explained, I found the motives of the character too weak for the extreme nature of his behavior. Additionally, the entire involvement of the CIA and the treatment of the events of the story as being a matter of national security to them also too much for me to believe once it is all explained out. The biggest let down of the book is what happens after the climax. All of the main characters of the book, such as Robert Langdon, Peter Solomon, and Katherine Solomon, seem to just bounce back to their happy philosophical selves after just a couple of hours from the time of the climax of the book. If we're supposed to believe how the world was about to end and considering the loss of life and/or near death experiences, the revelation of who Mal'akh is, and the blowing of some of the greatest secrets of the Freemasons, it just seemed absurd that the main characters of the book so quickly return to life-before-end-of-world-climax selves.
So here's the deal plotting (A), characters (C), setting (C), plausibility (D), description (C+), set pieces (A), theme (C). The Lost Symbol is conventional Dan Brown--a mystery to be solved by Robert Langdon, in the company of a woman, while he conjures with a bad guy and is being chased by a government agency. The mystery involves symbology, numerology, the doings of a secret society and first and last things (i.e. faith, religion, the nature of reality, the cosmos, etc.).

Comparisons with Angels and Demons and The DaVinci Code are inevitable, because Brown has created a franchise designed to produce a reliable product. This installment--The Lost Symbol--concerns freemasonry in Washington, D.C. A mentor of Langdon's has been taken against his will. Langdon partners with the mentor's sister to satisfy the demands of the mentor's captor and simultaneously reconstruct a pyramid, find a place and determine the key to wisdom that will facilitate the apotheosis of mankind.

The bad guy's name is Moloch (we [and Milton] would spell it that way); he's covered in tattoos, takes steroids, has castrated himself and likes to look at himself in the mirror nude as well as kill members of Langdon's mentor's family. The CIA director hot on Langdon's trail is short, female, and Japanese. A heavy smoker, she has yellowed teeth and a moustache. The mentor, Peter Solomon, is a 33rd degree mason/billionaire; his sister has a lab in which she is doing `noetic science', studying the ways in which mind affects matter. No one has ever told Brown that less can sometimes be more.

In the course of Langdon's race against time we get a tour of Washington, a city whose details Langdon knows much better than Brown, whose designation of neighborhoods and time/distance travel estimates will be seen as flawed by local residents. The compensation for this shortcoming may be the set pieces in which Brown plays out the details of numerology, myth and symbology. These are sometimes very impressive and very clever.

The major problem with the book, in my opinion, is the theme. It lacks the specificity of The DaVinci Code, a book with a theme that has been the subject of scholarship, a subject that concerns an essential issue in Catholicism, a subject that is controversial and engaging. The subject of The Lost Symbol is much more diffuse. For many it will be much less engaging. Most (or at least many) will quickly figure out the site which Langdon is laboring to find and most will be disappointed by what he finds there, not because it is unimportant but because it is sufficiently `common' that one wonders why all the masons in the book are trying to protect it at great personal cost. In short, the climax is anticlimactic in the extreme and it is followed by page after page of discourse which many readers will find preachy.

Having said all that, the book will still hold most readers' attention; with the discount they will not feel that they have wasted their money and they will look forward to Dan Brown's next book.