Connect
Sponsors
Currently Reading
My first romance novel!Terms
The Book Lady's Blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Reviews and articles posted here are property of The Book Lady's Blog and are not to be posted elsewhere without permission. Please contact me if you wish to post any of my work, or any excerpt thereof, in any other location or format.
Books and Blogs
Miscellaneous
Technical Stuff
Design Credits
Dec
06
The Weekend Review: DECODING THE LOST SYMBOL by Simon Cox
2009 at 3pm Posted by Rebecca Joines Schinsky
Published November 2009 by Touchstone (an imprint of Simon & Schuster)
The Quick and Dirty
One of the best things about working in a bookstore on Dan Brown Day is the knowing looks from crazy customers who lean across the customer service counter, clutching their copies of the newest Robert Langdon adventure, and whisper conspiratorially, “It’s all true, you know.”
Entertaining as those folks are, they are also sorely mistaken, and now there’s literary proof. In Decoding The Lost Symbol: The Unauthorized Expert Guide to the Facts Behind the Fiction, Simon Cox, known as “a historian of the obscure,” brings us an A-to-Z guide to the people, places, secret societies, and nitty gritty details of Dan Brown’s latest thriller. And he’s not afraid to say that it’s not all true.
The Big Ideas
Decoding The Lost Symbol is organized in alphabetically-listed sections that provide the background, history, and meaning behind the story Brown tries so valiantly to tell in The Lost Symbol. The very first entry tackles the villain of the story, who uses the alias Dr. Christopher Abaddon. Cox informs readers that in Hebrew, Abaddon means “place of destruction” and in Greek, it translates to Apollyon, meaning “destroyer.” Then he goes on to give details about translation, religious meanings, and the way Brown’s use of the word fits into the overall scheme of The Lost Symbol.
In a section on the Capitol Building, where much of the action in The Lost Symbol takes place, Cox explores Brown’s descriptions of the building’s architecture, history, and connection to Freemasonry (the chosen secret society in this book) and clears up readers’ confusion about some of the details. While it’s clear that Brown researched the Capitol (and everything else in the book….and then included WAY TOO MANY bits of the research in the story), he does take some creative license. Setting the record straight, Cox writers “One thing that does seem to be an invention in The Lost Symbol is the statement that there once was an eternal flame in the crypt.”
Statements like this appear throughout Decoding The Lost Symbol and serve to make this unauthorized guide a much more interesting read than the book it refers to.
In further chapters, Cox explores the symoblism on the dollar bill (which figures prominently in one part of the story), Benjamin Franklin, the Institute of Noetic Sciences (a MAJOR theme of The Lost Symbol), Thomas Jefferson, the Library of Congress, the pineal gland (yes, Dan Brown even tries to discuss biology!), George Washington, the Shriners, the Philosopher’s Stone (and I bet you thought that was just for Harry Potter!), alchemy, the predictions of 2012, and much, much, much more.
The Bottom Line
Though Cox occasionally gives Brown more credit than he deserves, like when he calls The Lost Symbol (which I’ve reviewed in spoilerific detail here) “a bold and ambitious undertaking,” he provides such interesting information that I’m willing to let it slide. Reading Decoding The Lost Symbol is akin to watching The History Channel’s Dan Brown-inspired specials, but it tackles an even broader spectrum of information and gives oodles of nerdy details that history buffs who read Brown for sheer entertainment value will appreciate. For the rest of us, it provides an enjoyable—if, at times, overly didactic—way to tease out fact from fiction.
Though it wouldn’t make much sense to read this book without reading the one it is based on, this one is a better read. 3 out of 5.
[...] The Weekend Review: DECODING THE LOST SYMBOL by Simon Cox [...]
This sounds like it is better than the Dan Brown book.