The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown

Indiana Jones-esque Robert Langdon is once again pulled out of his Harvard classrooms to solve another puzzle thriller, this one that centers around the Masonic origins of the United States. I liked this book for the same reasons I liked The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons - it is crazy interesting information and fascinating to know all the back stories to where many modern actions/words come from.

But maybe the third in line is a bit much for me, I felt like it was completely repetitive to his previous books. He once again is inadvertently called in to help solve this impossible that historians have debated for years and has the authorities chasing him while he is trying to find the answer (people KNOW him, why do they chase him??). In this one though, he kept pulling away and decrying the goal as a myth and no point to follow....very cynical of him I thought.

Rather than the in-depth analysis of art that the other two have, this one has a lot of science in it - that the book claims to be true (upon some research, there is a lot of research going on in the fields). It seemed completely bogus to me though and I'm still not entirely sure I see how it all fits in with the main plot. Basically, the main scientific study was of Noetics - which in my own layman's terms - is the power collective thinking can have on organisms....dubious I say.

I did like to hear about the Masonic activities of the founding fathers - Washington layed the cornerstone of the Capital Building in a Masonic ceremony, Jefferson took apart the King James Bible and reedited it together to find a hidden, deeper meaning! I've always heard that the founding fathers were fiercely religious so I was surprised that they would be involved in the Masons considering the negative connotation they have always had but this book makes the point that they were Masons and for the most part believed in a "higher being" but not necessarily the Christian God.

A recent article in the Baltimore Sun said that the Masons are hoping this book will revive interest in membership, apparently it has fallen off dramatically since the '60s.