Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

"Inferno" reads like a series of Wikipedia entries but with even less wit, charm, and literary merit (not to mention factual accuracy.) Dan Brown apparently writes his novels by skimming through a few guide books and encyclopedia articles and coming up with a bunch of "neat facts" that he hopes to stitch into something resembling a coherent plot. Unfortunately, this time even coherence is lost as he takes us on a lightning greatest hits tour through Italy and beyond. Why does Professor Langdon wake up with amnesia in a hospital in Florence? Why does he flee with the beautiful Sienna to Venice, where he must explore the nether reaches of St. Mark's Cathedral? Why not Des Moines or Oakland? The pursuit of the evil genius at the heart of this book could just as easily have led them to these less picturesque cities, but then no one would have read the book. In fact the presence of the Harvard professor of Symbology (is this a real academic field?) seems completely gratuitous. Brown justifies these improbable elements by transforming his villain into a Dante aficionado who drops clues that only someone with Langdon's expertise can decode. Perhaps in Dan Brown's next book the villain will be a baseball fan, posing stat-filled puzzles that only an intrepid Nate Silver can decipher. One of the most peculiar things is how ignorant this Harvard professor is of basic art history. He is constantly surprised by facts known to anyone who has ever taken a basic art history course, and when Brown tries to establish the great man's bona fides by showing him in front of a spellbound audience, Langdon spouts cliches worthy of a college sophomore whose knowledge extends only to the Cliff Notes. Annoyingly, Brown insists on giving us little potted lectures on every tourist attraction his heroes come across, offering up his banalities as if they were pearls of great wisdom. Worse still, this is about the most ham-fisted, clunky, and lifeless prose ever inflicted on an unsuspecting public. How many times do we have to read that so-and-so's eyes "flashed with anger"? Or that the professor is handsome and 6 feet tall (we know he's handsome because Brown lets us listen in on thoughts of all his female characters who confess to themselves how irresistibly attractive they find him)? Or that his companion is "pretty," "slender" and has an IQ of 208? Brown has nothing else to say about his characters, who remain completely without personality or inner motivation. Why do so many people fall for this stuff? There are plenty of popular writers who know how to craft a compelling, fast-paced story with vivid characters and real suspense (Stephen King and Thomas Harris come to mind), but Dan Brown doesn't even rise to the level of basic competence. His continued success is a mystery more perplexing than anything he's conjured in the pages of his latest potboiler.