Angels and Demons, Dan Brown

Robert Langdon is a professor from Harvard, and after a highly successful book about symbols, he has received a lot of calls from people wanting him to look at ‘signs’ they’d received from God. But this call, at five thirty am, is different. The voice is quiet, and asks Robert to go to Geneva. Robert is incredulous at first, but a faxed picture changes his mind. A corpse, with the head twisted so that it faces the floor. And on its chest, the symbol of a group long thought to have been extinct. The Illuminati.

                The Illuminati were, or are, a group of thinkers and scholars which had decided to defy the church, and to speak out what they thought. With leaders such as Galileo, they projected their thoughts but were pacifist, trying to cooperate with the church rather than defy it. But the Illuminati got very violent, and were supposedly exterminated by the church. Supposedly. So when a highly volatile substance called antimatter is stolen from a lab; the same lab in which the corpse was found, the Illuminati are the obvious suspects.

There are two key characters; the rest are more secondary, and though they play important roles, not many of them are often mentioned.

Robert Langdon is a professor of symbology, and looks like ‘Harrison Ford in a tweed coat’. He swims fifty laps a day, and plays water polo well.

Vittoria Vetra is the daughter of the corpse, or the assassinated scientist. With him, she was working on recreating the Big Bang, where she discovered antimatter. It is an extremely explosive substance, and the amount stolen is exceptionally large; one quarter of a gram. This amount could blow up half a city, and due to the battery life of the anti matter container, and this gives Robert and Vittoria a 24 hour window to retrieve the container.

 

This story is aimed at all round audiences; I think eleven years up is fine, due to the simplistic style of writing. However, there are some rather gory parts which should be taken into account before reading the book.

                I think the book was a very good read, and that the twists in this story are exceptional; you can never be sure who the baddy really is. I give it a 9/10 rating, for the plot, and for the ambigrams.

Well done, Dan Brown!

Deception Point, Dan Brown

Dan Brown has an interesting and often unexpected twist to his books; one of the main characters could be a culprit, or something that seems right suddenly turns out to be wrong… this is just a brief glimpse to deception point. Basically, this is the story about NASA trying to revive itself during the presidential elections: the current president, and the senator for the elections (Zach Herney) wants to keep NASA the way it is, and the other senator (Sedgewick Sexton) wants to privatize NASA, because it is a failure, swallowing money as if it were water. But then, something is found beneath the arctic, which would justify every American (tax) dollar NASA has spent in space.            Deception point is a book that is impossible to let go, because every page brings a new plot and a new question to be answered. There are a few central characters to this book, namely four civilian scientists recruited by NASA and Zach Herney to provide an unbiased opinion on NASA’s find:

Rachel Sexton: Sedgewick Sexton’s daughter, she seems the unlikely candidate for a civilian opinion, but in fact, it was a very good idea on Herney’s part: Sedgewick will have a harder time denying the discovery if it was also confirmed by his daughter.

Mike Tolland: made famous by his oceanic documentaries, he is in charge of making a documentary about NASA’s discovery. He is handsome, and is someone that can easily be trusted.

Corky Marlinson: a civilian astrophysicist, he is a grumpy character and someone who is very decided on what he thinks.

Norah Mangor: an ice analyzer who hates Marlinson.

Hours away from when the president is going to reveal this discovery to the public, the civilian scientists realize something is wrong. Very wrong. 8/10 for a gripping, awesome book.