The Lost Symbol

In the end, as with “The Da Vinci Code,” there’s no payoff. Brown should stop worrying about unfinished pyramids and worry about unfinished novels. At least Spielberg and Lucas gave us an Ark and swirling, dissolving humans. We don’t get any ancient wisdom that “will profoundly change the

world as you know it” — just a lot of New Agey piffle about how we are the gods we’ve been waiting for. (And a father-son struggle for global domination, as though we didn’t get enough of that with the Bushes.)

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The Age

There are moments of excitement in this skilfully edited, deeply implausible thriller. At times the suspense is prolonged rather than sustained, but the 500 pages turn steadily and the overall effect is entertaining and certainly family-friendly. The Lost Symbol is violent but remarkably chaste and

devoid of profanity.

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Read And Find Out

If you hate Dan Brown, you're going to hate this book. It seems Brown has decided to irk his critics by repeating every flaw he's been accused of. ... No, it's not Foucault's Pendulum. It doesn't even come close. However, if you liked Dan Brown's previous books you're likely to enjoy this one.

There is some interesting trivia about the history of Washington, DC which is in fact true, which is an added bonus.

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The Times

It’s true, his style is as baldly prosaic as legend, but there remains a heft to his potboilers that is hard to imitate. He is better at conveying claustrophobia and breathlessness than, say, the explosion of a top-secret lab (“fragments of titanium mesh . . . droplets of melted silicon” etc)

but the latter will make a juicier scene come the inevitable Tom Hanks movie, and the author knows this.

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The Wall Street Journal

As a thriller, "The Lost Symbol" is exciting, although readers of "The Da Vinci Code" will notice that some of the same stock characters and creaky plot devices pop up... As District of Columbia resident, I must say that Mr. Brown does a first-rate job of delivering a Cook's tour with duly sinister

overtones of Washington's famous sites... It's when Mr. Brown interrupts his storytelling to deliver one of his many lectures on Christian intolerance—with pointed digs at the American religious right—that "The Lost Symbol" becomes a didactic bore.

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Salon

If the mystery at the center of "The Lost Symbol" never quite gets solved, it's still surrounded with exactly the kind of feel-good folderol that readers love in a bestseller... Pseudoscience could turn out to be even more profitable for Dan Brown than pseudohistory. It may not make for as good a

story, but then again, that may be just one more thing that nobody cares about anymore.

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The Barnes & Noble Review

The Lost Symbol works, albeit with reservations. It works because whatever mental alchemy Dan Brown needed to turn away from the noise and ramp up his creative signal, to stay away from distractions and focus on the story, takes hold with the opening utterance that "the secret is how to die."

The Washington Post

Writers envious of Brown's sales (who wouldn't be?) have devoted much ink to his deficiencies as a stylist. These are still in place. ("He could feel his entire world teetering precariously on the brink of disaster. . . . It hit him like a bolt from above. . . . In a flash he understood.") So is

Brown's habit of turning characters into docents. But so, too, is his knack for packing huge amounts of information (spurious or no) into an ever-accelerating narrative. Call it Brownian motion: a comet-tail ride of short paragraphs, short chapters, beautifully spaced reveals and, in the case of "The Lost Symbol," a socko unveiling of the killer's true identity.

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BBC

The Washington setting may not be as alluring as the Vatican or the Louvre, but Brown extracts enough history out of his landscape to make this a fascinating ride. And he squeezes in plenty of contemporary references too: characters run Google searches on their BlackBerrys, text on their iPhones

and one jokes about the "Twitterati". Such is Brown's visual writing style, the feeling as you close the last page is not that you've read only the novel, but that you've also just watched the film.

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Los Angeles Times

It's hard to imagine anyone, after reading "The Lost Symbol," debating about Freemasonry in Washington, D.C., the way people did Brown's radical vision of Jesus and Mary Magdalene in "Code." That book hit a deep cultural nerve for obvious reasons; "The Lost Symbol" is more like the experience on

any roller coaster -- thrilling, entertaining and then it's over.

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The New York Times

Too many popular authors (Thomas Harris) have followed huge hits (“The Silence of the Lambs”) with terrible embarrassments (“Hannibal”). Mr. Brown hasn’t done that. Instead, he’s bringing sexy back to a genre that had been left for dead.

knjigainfo.com

Den Braun je ovog puta odabrao da svog junaka, profesora simbologije sa Harvarda Roberta Lengdona, pošalje u Vašington. Tamo bi on trebalo da održi predavanje na poziv svog mentora, direktora centralne americke naucne institucije Smitsonijan instituta, visokog funkcionera vašingtonske masonske

lože Pitera Solomona (masona 33 stepena). Narednih 12 sati, koliko traje radnja romana, Lengdon otkriva da je Solomon kidnapovan, pošto je u sali gde je trebalo da se održi predavanje našao ruku nabijenu na kolac. Na ruci su istetovirani odredeni simboli, a tek na osnovu prstena on prepoznaje da je pripadala Solomonu. Stiže mu poruka da ce njegov mentor biti ubijen ako ne pronade gde se nalazi tajna masonska piramida u Vašingtonu. On, takode, mora da sazna kljucnu rec koja daje neslucenu moc.

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Bookreporter.com

Has it been worth the wait? Overall, yes. But that’s not to say that the book is without its shortcomings.

knjigainfo.com

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