GW was a mason

Brown, D., (2009). The Lost Symbol. New York: Doubleday Books.


The Lost Symbol. By Dan Brown
Doubleday, 509 pages, $29.95



The reviewer for the Wall Street Journal, Charlotte Allen,is contributing editor of the Manhattan Institute's Minding the Campus Web site. [The Manhattan Institute is something of a conservative organization.]
She does not seem overly impressed with the book; her review's title puts it: Still More Secrets - Together again, an exciting thriller and a tedious sermon.

She does grant: 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. I specially enjoyed Langdon and Katherine's narrow escape from the CIA by riding the book conveyor belts of the Library of Congress.

And then she gives herself away: A video unearthed by Langdon depicting numerous highly placed Washingtonians including two Supreme Court justices! wearing full Masonic regalia and participating in a ritual that involves faux-human sacrifice and the drinking of wine from a human skull reminded me of the "Stonecutters" episode of "The Simpsons": "Who controls the British crown? Who keeps the metric system down? We do!"

Ah, the Simpsons as a great cultural institution.

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.

The reviewer for the New York Times entitles her review Fasten Your Seat Belts, There’s Code to Crack. She does not seem particularly thrilled with the book, either, though she does not criticize the author's lecturing. In fact, she does praise him, some.

Separate from critics and reviewers, the book sold a million copies today, its first day in the marketplace. And, in the Nassau County OPAC, it has 823 holds on first copy returned of 388 copies, 227 holds on first copy returned of 48 copies (for Large Type), and 120 holds on first copy returned of 19 copies on the CD book.