Angels & Demons (D. Brown)

2004-09-06 2 min read Books Marco

How would you like the subtitle: “Robert Langdon’s first adventure?”
After reading “Holy Blood, Holy Grail”, I realized how hard it would be for Dan Brown to repeat the success of The Da Vinci Code. Indeed, Angels & Demons does not reach the same levels of depth as the predecessor, and falls back on a great many trappings of Brown’s work.
We have the struggle between science and religion, who becomes a stand-in for the debate between technology and politics in the early Brown novels. We have the beautiful but frigid heroine that meets the hunky but geeky hero at the beginning of the tribulations. We have a plot full of twists and turns, and a grand finale in which rationality wins.
Surely, Angels and Demons is a step up from Brown’s early novels. Unfortunately, though, since he writes the background history all by himself, it’s not coherent and compelling. Again, we are made to run through a novel with no reason, chasing after the solution of a case that will leave us without as much as excitement.
I wish Dan Brown good luck finding another ‘Holy Blood, Holy Grail’. Once he finds another compelling background story he can narrate to, he will have another hit of the magnitude of The Da Vinci Code.

Deception Point (D. Brown)

2004-09-06 3 min read Books Marco

Probably the first of the very successful set of novels written by Dan Brown, Deception Point opens with a series of themes that will be recurrent throughout Brown’s work. We find the hero and heroine couple to be, meeting at the beginning of the book and forging an unlikely alliance. The hero will be someone that has sworn not to fall in love again; he will be handsome but learned, desired but humble. The heroine will be stunning but too smart to deal with commoners.
The father figure shows up very prominently. In this case, that’s not the heroine’s actual father, who doesn’t ever behave father-like in the whole novel. Instead, it’s the heroine’s boss. This is a prelude to more similar figures throughout the series, and implicates that an almost Oedipal relationship with older men is what prevents the heroine from binding to one of the multitude of men seeking her.
Twists are another recurring item. In Dan Brown’s work, the plot twists like a snake recoiling in a captor’s hand. What seemed good becomes evil, and who seemed friend becomes foe. This need for twists in the plot line gives Brown’s novels a level of ambiguity they share with a lot of thrillers: since you are never sure about the goodness of a character, morality becomes very ambiguous.
Research is another one of Brown’s naturals. When he talks about scientific or technical matters, he sounds very convincing. Despite this, to the expert all his stories have severe logical flaws that render them virtually indistinguishable from Hollywood movies, whose written memento these books seem to be.
Deception Point is a story about a meteorite used to justify the existence of NASA. It is about a close presidential race, in which the incumbent is honest but losing, the opponent cunning but dishonest. And finally it is about a spy and an oceanographer who fall in love despite being both very much the classical Brown misanthropes.
In the end, Deception Point fails on many levels. The premise of the story, a fake meteorite, is too unbelievable to be true. Despite the admonition that all technology in the book is real, placing a meteorite under and ice shelf seems too much a complication to be acceptable.
As a novel, Deception Point is too unevenly paced. Descriptive elements will be inserted in high-paced sections, and where a slowing of the pace would allow for a credible description of the characters, Brown rushes as if hit by an evil editor seeking to cut the end in half.
As a thriller, Deception Point is too predictable. While there are a great many actors in the drama, the premise of the hidden meteorite points directly towards the ultimate culprit. Even if you wouldn’t want to believe his (or her, I don’t want to spoil your fun!) guilt, you are still faced with the realization there are only two other characters that can be at fault.
If you have read all books by Dan Brown, read this for comparison. If you haven’t but intend to read them all, then start a chronological progression. If you are just curious about Dan Brown, read The Da Vinci Code – an almost perfect zenith of his writing, spoiled only by the realization that it’s going to be quite impossible for him to reach the same levels.

The Da Vinci Code (D. Brown)

2004-09-06 3 min read Books Marco

Imagine the disappointment that I felt when I bought ‘Holy Blood, Holy Grail’ and found out that ‘The Da Vinci Code’ (TDVC) was a mere novelization of the former!
I thought Dan Brown had outdone himself, collecting information as U. Eco had done for ‘Foucault’s Pendulum’. As a matter of fact, TDVC read like what Foucault’s Pendulum would have wanted to be. Where the latter lacked in a compelling reason to exist and was essentially a manifesto of rationalism (BORING!), the former looked into the exact same historic thread, revealing the same masterful connections in a bright shining light.
TDVC is a novel of deeply historic concern. Based on actual research, the author follows a hero and his heroine on a quest for the Holy Grail. As usual in Brown’s books they meet just for the purpose and didn’t know each other prior to the story’s beginning, which is set in the Louvre.
From the Louvre, the plot ripples all over France, reminding me of the later novels of the Mr. Ripley series. In the end, we find out that Jesus Christ had a family, that they fled Palestine for France, settled there, and created a lineage that goes on to this day.
Now, the historic facts behind this plot line are all taken from Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which is written as a documentary book. The embellishments in the plot are typical Dan Brown: a heroine in distress, an erudite and good-looking hero, a conspiracy that tangentially involves our new-formed couple, but sucks them into a vortex of danger, death and disillusion.
If you had analyzed things, you would have come up with exactly this scenario. Mr. Brown’s evolution as a writer goes from the seriously overwritten Deception Point to the streamlined Digital Fortress; from there to Angels and Demons, where religion is discovered as a new and compelling theme. In all these books, though, plot lines are tactical and not strategic. There is a certain lack of thematic uniformity (read: message) that makes all those books interesting reads, but not compelling ones.
Thematic continuity is certainly the dominant character of Holy Blood, Holy Grail. On the other hand, the strict documentary nature of the book relegates is to the realm of non-fiction readers. And the story is just to compelling to be put on the same shelf as the latest self-help tome or the newest business theory.
Combined in TDVC, historic fact and formulaic novelization combine into a killler package. TDVC has both the romantic interest that binds the female readership as well as a reason to keep you interested in the story. Well done – but very, very hard to repeat.

Digital Fortress (D. Brown)

2004-09-06 2 min read Books Marco

Digital Fortress is a fast-paced thriller with a strong technological background and an odd location in National Security circles.
Before Dan Brown moved to religion as a topic, security and espionage were his main themes. Both Digital Fortress and the earlier Deception Point deal with the interaction between espionage and politics, bringing the delicate balance between good and evil to attention.
Dan Brown loves twists. The plots of his novels are the conventional spy novels, in which a good pair/couple deals with a series of ambiguous and powerful characters. Readers are required to think that these powerful characters are on the good or the evil side depending on the torque of the plot’s twists at the moment.
Digital Fortress is about a secure encryption algorithm and the need to have a trap door into any such algorithm. There is one historic fact behind this story line: the FBI demanded that any encryption algorithm have a secured trap door, such that nobody could encrypt anything that the FBI couldn’t read.
Unfortunately both for the book and the FBI, that’s a little bit like asking to create a lock that can always be opened by a master key, but that is supposed to be secure: the good guys will use it, exposing themselves to the bad guys that stole the master key; the bad guys aren’t going to be as stupid as using an encryption mechanism that is easily decoded.
As a result, the technical part of the novel is deeply flawed and not too interesting. The plot, though, is acceptable in its fatal twists and turns. The characters are sometimes believable – allthough Dan Brown would be well-advised to research the ‘eternal father figure’ in his books. Is it something that he came up with, or is it the brainchild of an editor?
In any case, Digital Fortress ends up being a little formulaic. I am glad Mr. Brown found a much more compelling environment in the Catholic Church.

The Perfect Store (M. Cohen)

2004-02-08 2 min read Books Marco

The Internet is built on the resilience of four big players: Yahoo!, Amazon, Google, and eBay. I had the good luck and fortune to work for Yahoo! for two years and got in touch with the inner working of the Internet in a very exciting way. But if I had to say what company exemplifies the power of the Internet more than any other one, it would be eBay.
Networks accelerate transactions. That’s true for social networks, where you can find romance or a new job much faster than if you were all by yourself. Computer networks work the same, accelerating the rate at which people that want to interact can find each other.
eBay works its magic for the most common transaction between strangers: buying and selling. Imagine you have something you want to rid yourself of. Someone else on Earth most certainly needs exactly that thing. Unfortunately, until eBay came into being, there was no way that you and the other person could know about each other’s need.
It’s as simple as that. It’s so simple, it’s magic indeed. And behind all this sits a single Frenchman, Pierre Omidyar. A genius of insight, or just a lucky guy – nobody will ever know now. Pierre created eBay, realized its power, sat through all the travail and the tribulations, and finally launched himself as a commoner with (literally) several tons of cash into a boring existence in France.
We are left over with a company that could not fail, although it surely tried a great many times. Pierre hires Skoll, Skoll and Pierre hire Meg Whitman, and it’s a story with a happy ending.
Cohen seems quite objective with his writing, and succeeds in making the history of eBay alive and kicking. Sometimes he sounds a bit naive (like when he writes for the tenth time that, this time for sure, the management team had understood the value of community, just to fail again after a few pages). Still, the book quite doesn’t compare with other descriptions of the Internet startup world.

The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest (P. Bronson)

2003-12-15 1 min read Books Marco

There you have it! What a wonderful, funny book!
Po Bronson is an amazing author. His prose reads very smoothly, he strikes the right balance between patronizing and geeky (which may be just because I am in the same balance point) and he is amazingly witty.
The First $20 Million is the story of a group of geeks that create their own startup doing … Java. Well, in the book it’s something entirely different, it’s a cross-platform scripting language that compiles once and runs everywhere. Sounds familiar?
Po (I’ll just call him that) captures the essentials of nitty-gritty Silicon Valley. The greed, the idealism, the passion of the geek. He makes a nerd’s writing code for days without sleep plausible; he conveys what it is that makes these social derelicts (and I am one of them) able to function and thrive in an environment that nobody else likes.
And he is funny. Not laughing-out-loud funny, more grin-to-smile funny. Frankly, given the subject matter, not easy to accomplish nonetheless.
I like it. I liked his other famous book, “The Nudist in the Late Shift” better, because it was more varied. Somehow Po is more the short story kinda guy.

First, Break All the Rules

2003-12-15 2 min read Books Marco

Have you ever read a book that seemed to say the obvious, but whose words of wisdom you then started using as a day-to-day framework to explain to others what seemed so obvious to you?
Well, “First, Break All the Rules” is a book like that. It explains how management should be handled, and more importantly how it should NOT be handled, and takes a stand against Dilbertism of all kinds. Should seem obvious, but Dilbertism is quite entrenched in a lot of corporations, and a book with a lot of quotable sentences comes in handy.
To the content: Gallup is famous as a polling company. They have been polling a lot of employees of companies, though, and provided management support services by creating cross-sections of best practices. This book is the summary of that experience.
There are a few surprising results that come out this book. The very first one is that the immediate manager of anyone is the main focus of attention. If you like the way you are managed, you will like the company you work for, and vice versa. This means that all the best speeches from upper management are worth nothing unless they change the behavior of your manager.
The second thing that is really surprising is that the best management style is to reward the able and to punish the unable and lazy. That hardly seemed surprising to me, until I worked myself under a manager that thought everybody is entitled to the same treatment.
With these two pearls, I pretty much summarized the book. Everything else is a list of examples of managers and their real life interaction with their managed. And of course an enormous list of validation. Lots of quotables, as mentioned, will help you get through your day. Whether it’s worth it, your choice. I found the book way overpriced and wished they had a softcover edition.

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them (A. Franken)

2003-12-06 2 min read Books Marco

Once in a while there is a book that leaves a strange taste in my mouth. This year, it was Al Franken’s “Lies”, a self-declared “Fair and Balanced Look at the Right”.
It’s my first book by this author, and I read it on a fabulous vacation in Maui. The fact itself I finished it is witness to the fact it was, if nothing else, interesting. But the taste…
The premise is that the right consistently accuses the left of all sorts of things, while claiming for itself virtue and honesty and competence. Of course, so the book goes,if you look closely, a lot of it is lies.
Franken goes through a lot of different chapters where he ‘debunks’ a lot of conservative myths, demolishes a lot of conservative people and writes to anyone’s funny bone. A lot of the time you have to agree with him, a lot of the time he is totally hyperbolic, and a lot of the time it’s up to you to guess whether he is closer to one end or the other.
Rarely have I seen something that seemed entirely wrong, albeit I confess most of the time I have to go for his research, since I don’t have time or desire to do it on my own.
And that’s pretty much where the strange taste came in. Now I feel the only way to be fair is to read a book by a conservative author, and none of the ones I have seen so far is in any way funny or humorous. If you know one, please tell me!

Aztec Autums (G. Jennings)

2003-10-04 1 min read Books Marco

Oh, what high praise was lavished on this book! It seemed the entire elite of the Nation threw itself on these few hundred pages, naming Mr. Jennings the greatest writer of history in the land.
Well, not much to deserve. The story is that of a warrior in a far-off city in Northern Mexico who decides he wants revenge and decides to defeat the Spaniards who killed his father, burning him on the stake under the eyes of his (unknowing at that time) son.
There are many reasons why the book doesn’t work. First, the development of the story is extremely uneven, with those parts that the book should have amplified (given the fictitious premise it is an account of the glory of this man) largely neglected; then, the opinions of the main character are more from the view point of the U.S. moralist of the 20th century that the fresh voice of a Mexican of the 16th; finally, while its predecessor was indeed a page turner, this one is as bad an attempt to copy the former success as is typical in a different genre, in movies.
No need to comment further. Stay away, if you don’t need to read this book.

Baudolino (U. Eco)

2003-10-04 3 min read Books Marco

Yet another Umberto Eco novel that plays in the Middle Ages. This one has the advantage of touching one of my dearest subjects in history, the fall of Byzantium, but otherwise, well…
This is the story of Baudolino, a character that makes it from the humbles upbringing to becoming adoptive son to the greatest of all German emperors, Frederick Barbarossa (“red-beard’). Frederick needs to go on a crusade, so Baudolino does. But Baudolino has the added mission to discover the Holy Grail.
Eco has always been very fond of the closeness of truth and invention. In his first novel, “The Name of the Rose”, the classical whodunit tale spins in a medieval convent, where everybody lies to advance themselves in some way. The plot is master, and the development of characters and ambiance suffers.
His second novel, “Foucault’s Pendulum”, was much more of my liking, although it didn’t reach the same success that its predecessor accomplished. I liked it so much, indeed, that I completed a translation into Esperanto, soon killed by malevolent colleagues.
His third novel, “The Island of the Day Before”, fared even worse. I bought it in Italy, but was so bored by the premise that I never read it to the end. And I had given up on Eco for good.
Now, Baudolino. In Foucault’s Pendulum, the main characters (if there are such) invent a history and by doing so modify the present. They decide to guise a plot that ties the Templars with the Rosicrucians, and thence to the present. And although the plot is made up, the consequences are real.
In Baudolino, the making up is integral part of the story, and it is unclear at all times what is true and what isn’t. The narrator doesn’t know, we don’t know, and the book doesn’t know. It was indeed fascinating to be swayed on this long journey of discovery.
Yet, somehow the book ends up being flat. It doesn’t reveal anything but the fact that people lie, and that’s not a revelation that is good enough to carry 300 pages. And the more crazy the assertions go, the less we are going to believe them. Baudolino ends up in the land of monsters? Sure enough, it’s just a novel.
If the book were not just a mere continuation of the other novels, it is made even worse by the translation. William Weaver is really unimaginative when it comes to Italian, and he is not willing to follow the switch from vernacular to high Italian in the original. Some of the characters will speak their dialect throughout the book, but the translation reveals that only in odd phrases.
There is a reference to something being not more important than a dry fig. Funny expression, isn’t it? Well, in Italian “non me ne importa un fico secco” means “I really don’t give a damn’”, and has as much to do with dried figs as comparing apples and oranges has with apples or oranges. Why Mr. Weaver didn’t weave this into his translation, I can’t guess. It gives me a chance to get rid of a horrible pun.

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