Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons and The Lost Symbol will publish his new novel, Inferno, on May 14 and has already reached #5 on Amazon's best-seller list . He's sold 200 million copies of his books and the first printing of Inferno will be 4 million copies.
Doubleday is celebrating the 10th anniversary of The DaVinci Code which sold 81 million copies with a free download until March 24th of the entire book. Dan Brown's Inferno: Everything we know so far
"If Dan Brown does for Dante what he did for Leonardo [Da Vinci], the general public will probably be delighted, while the scholarly community will probably tear out their hair," says Stephen Milner, the Serena professor of Italian at Manchester University, in an interview with The Independent. In the months after its release, The Da Vinci Code proved maddening for many religious scholars, who found it difficult to convince the novel's millions of fans that its dramatic "revelations" about Jesus Christ were truly fictional, and some fear that Brown's decision to tackle Dante's revered, Christianity-infused text could have a similar effect.
For someone who declares that his novels are based on fact, he makes an enormous number of egregious errors in fact in all three of his earlier published books. The London Telegraph does some research and finds at least 50 factual errors in his work
Some are major, some are minor. They are divided, somewhat arbitrarily, into categories of "History", "Geography", "Science", "Symbols, Religion and Mythology", "Language" and "Miscellany".
Here are just a few:
Langdon is shown lecturing his students that the Christian tradition of communion, eating the body of their god, comes from the Aztecs. Communion has taken place since the first century; the Aztec civilisation arose during the 13th century. Europeans did not reach central America, where the Aztecs lived, until the late 15th century.
A character says Nicolaus Copernicus was murdered by the church for contradicting Biblical teaching. In fact Copernicus died of a stroke in 1543; there is no evidence of any wrongdoing.
Langdon's love interest, physicist Vittoria Vetra, says that Raphael's body "was relocated to the Pantheon in 1758", having previously been interred in Urbino. This is not true: Raphael was always buried in the Pantheon, as a notice now says by his tomb in response to the book.
According to one character, the BBC journalist Gunther Glick, "the Rhodes Scholarships were funds set up centuries ago to recruit the world's brightest young minds into the Illuminati." The Rhodes Scholarships, international scholarships to the University of Oxford, were established in 1902 after the death of Cecil Rhodes.
The Swiss Guard, traditional defenders of the Vatican, are said to be "rumored to have decapitated countless Muslims while defending the Christian crusaders in the fifteenth century" with their longswords. The Guard were founded in 1506. The seventh and final Crusade took place in 1270.
Brown claims that that Galileo was a member of the Illuminati. Galileo died in 1642: the Illuminati, a society dedicated to free thinking and the Enlightenment, were formed in Bavaria in 1776.
I'm guessing his editors at Doubleday could care less so long as he brings in so much money.
Posted by Jill Fallon at March 21, 2013 9:29 AM | Permalink