Thursday, October 13, 2005

One More Crack At Dan Brown

OK, I promise, I'll never mention The Da Vinci Code again, but Robert Sheaffer at Skeptic has offered a comprehensive and annoted rebuttal of Dan Brown's pop-culture blockbuster. His conclusion:
The rational person can enjoy reading works of fiction or science fiction, even trite fiction like The Da Vinci Code, without worrying excessively about obvious absurdities within the story. But a problem arises when a work of fiction explicitly claims to be more than a work of fiction, when it resonates with other widespread misinformation within the culture, and when 25 million readers are bamboozled by its specious assertions. The alleged “facts” in The Da Vinci Code are no more credible than those in Holy Blood, Holy Grail, from which they are taken. If you think of yourself as a skeptic you’ll do well to realize that very little fact is mixed in with Brown’s fiction. [link to Holy Blood, Holy Grail article at Wikipedia not in original]
Hopefully, by now, many "regular readers" have realized that there is very little history in Brown's book. However, given mankind's history of believing conspiracies, I doubt it!

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