Angels & Demons (D. Brown)

How would you like the subtitle: “Robert Langdon’s first adventure?” After reading “Holy Blood, Holy Grail”, I realized how hard it would be for Dan Brown to repeat the success of The Da Vinci Code. Indeed, Angels & Demons does not reach the same levels of depth as the predecessor, and falls back on a great many trappings of Brown’s work. We have the struggle between science and religion, who becomes a stand-in for the debate between technology and politics in the early Brown novels. Continue reading

Deception Point (D. Brown)

Probably the first of the very successful set of novels written by Dan Brown, Deception Point opens with a series of themes that will be recurrent throughout Brown’s work. We find the hero and heroine couple to be, meeting at the beginning of the book and forging an unlikely alliance. The hero will be someone that has sworn not to fall in love again; he will be handsome but learned, desired but humble. Continue reading

The Da Vinci Code (D. Brown)

Imagine the disappointment that I felt when I bought ‘Holy Blood, Holy Grail’ and found out that ‘The Da Vinci Code’ (TDVC) was a mere novelization of the former! I thought Dan Brown had outdone himself, collecting information as U. Eco had done for ‘Foucault’s Pendulum’. As a matter of fact, TDVC read like what Foucault’s Pendulum would have wanted to be. Where the latter lacked in a compelling reason to exist and was essentially a manifesto of rationalism (BORING! Continue reading

Digital Fortress (D. Brown)

Digital Fortress is a fast-paced thriller with a strong technological background and an odd location in National Security circles. Before Dan Brown moved to religion as a topic, security and espionage were his main themes. Both Digital Fortress and the earlier Deception Point deal with the interaction between espionage and politics, bringing the delicate balance between good and evil to attention. Dan Brown loves twists. The plots of his novels are the conventional spy novels, in which a good pair/couple deals with a series of ambiguous and powerful characters. Continue reading

The Perfect Store (M. Cohen)

The Internet is built on the resilience of four big players: Yahoo!, Amazon, Google, and eBay. I had the good luck and fortune to work for Yahoo! for two years and got in touch with the inner working of the Internet in a very exciting way. But if I had to say what company exemplifies the power of the Internet more than any other one, it would be eBay. Networks accelerate transactions. Continue reading

The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest (P. Bronson)

There you have it! What a wonderful, funny book! Po Bronson is an amazing author. His prose reads very smoothly, he strikes the right balance between patronizing and geeky (which may be just because I am in the same balance point) and he is amazingly witty. The First $20 Million is the story of a group of geeks that create their own startup doing … Java. Well, in the book it’s something entirely different, it’s a cross-platform scripting language that compiles once and runs everywhere. Continue reading

First, Break All the Rules

Have you ever read a book that seemed to say the obvious, but whose words of wisdom you then started using as a day-to-day framework to explain to others what seemed so obvious to you? Well, “First, Break All the Rules” is a book like that. It explains how management should be handled, and more importantly how it should NOT be handled, and takes a stand against Dilbertism of all kinds. Continue reading

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them (A. Franken)

Once in a while there is a book that leaves a strange taste in my mouth. This year, it was Al Franken’s “Lies”, a self-declared “Fair and Balanced Look at the Right”. It’s my first book by this author, and I read it on a fabulous vacation in Maui. The fact itself I finished it is witness to the fact it was, if nothing else, interesting. But the taste… The premise is that the right consistently accuses the left of all sorts of things, while claiming for itself virtue and honesty and competence. Continue reading

Aztec Autums (G. Jennings)

Oh, what high praise was lavished on this book! It seemed the entire elite of the Nation threw itself on these few hundred pages, naming Mr. Jennings the greatest writer of history in the land. Well, not much to deserve. The story is that of a warrior in a far-off city in Northern Mexico who decides he wants revenge and decides to defeat the Spaniards who killed his father, burning him on the stake under the eyes of his (unknowing at that time) son. Continue reading

Baudolino (U. Eco)

Yet another Umberto Eco novel that plays in the Middle Ages. This one has the advantage of touching one of my dearest subjects in history, the fall of Byzantium, but otherwise, well… This is the story of Baudolino, a character that makes it from the humbles upbringing to becoming adoptive son to the greatest of all German emperors, Frederick Barbarossa (“red-beard’). Frederick needs to go on a crusade, so Baudolino does. Continue reading