The Art of Creative Thinking
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A scuba diving company faces bankruptcy because sharks have infested the area. Solution? Open the...
The Power of Eight: The Miraculous Healing Effects of Small Groups
Book
What we send out into the universe comes back to us, magnified. Although the power of intention -...
Trance Journeys of the Hunter-Gatherers: Ecstatic Practices to Reconnect with the Great Mother and Heal the Earth
Book
Early man ran with the animals, lived with the animals, and was one with the wild symphony of the...
Visual Phenomenology
Book
In this book, Michael Madary examines visual experience, drawing on both phenomenological and...
American Founding Son: John Bingham and the Invention of the Fourteenth Amendment
Book
John Bingham was the architect of the rebirth of the United States following the Civil War. A...
Bioinformation
Beth Greenhough and Bronwyn Parry
Book
From DNA sequences stored on computer databases to archived forensic samples and biomedical records,...
Culture and Emotional Economy of Migration
Book
This book studies how the act of migration is a motivating constituent in the production of popular...
Environmental Justice and Land Use Conflict: The Governance of Mineral and Gas Resource Development
Book
Conflict over the extraction of coal and gas resources has rapidly escalated in communities...
Governing Complex Systems: Social Capital for the Anthropocene
Book
The onset of the Anthropocene, an era in which human actions have become major drivers of change on...
David McK (3562 KP) rated Angels and Demons in Books
Jul 4, 2021
And, like, I'm sure, many others, I actually read that sequel first, only later discovering it was such (although, admittedly, not a direct sequel) and going back to read the first on the series.
This is the one largely set in and around Rome, with a high-tech ticking time-bomb counting down in Vatican City as the Cardinals all meet to elect a new Pope following the death of the previous incumbent of that role. It also makes lots of the (supposed?) divide between religion and science, drawing on lots of conspiracy theories and bringing back into the realms of popular culture that old secret society, the illuminati.
I have no problem with any of that, and I do like a bit of derring-do, mystery and romance, but even I found it hard at times to swallow some of the outlandish scenarios and set pieces of this novel - I think, for me, the icing on the cake was the surviving-a-jump-out-of-a-helicopter-without-a-parachute bit towards the end!