Secrets of the Code

I'd half hoped for a book featuring relevant historical background on some of the assertions made in The DaVinci Code, and I was encouraged by Burstein's introduction, as it sounded like this was what he was trying to achieve in writing Secrets of the Code. But it seems Burstein may not have had

Show More

the requisite training or motivation to carry off such a moderately ambitious project, as his research seems to have consisted mainly of reading everything he could lay hands on about the subject without regard to whether it was written by crackpots or scholars, and his authorship seems to have consisted mainly of compiling excerpts "exploring" different "perspectives" about the possible historical basis of the persona of Mary Magdalene, et al., with minimal added conceptual synthesis or analysis (which is, I feel, a problem in itself, though I cannot review text which doesn't exist).

It's hard to lay blame on Burstein himself for the many strange, erroneous claims made by the authors he included (such as the statement by Lynn Picknett that the name of ancient Egypt, KMT, was a reference to the racial phenotype of its people rather than the fertility of its land), but he cannot be completely blameless as it's mainly due to his freewheeling standards for vetting sources that the historical connection of his text is tenuous at best.

Show Less