The Firm by John Grisham – Review

Taken from http://goo.gl/054N

The Firm runs deep with deception. It all starts when a lawyer, Mitch McDeere fresh out of Harvard Law school, gets recruited by Bendini, Lambert & Lockre one of the top law firms in the world. The firm is filled with forty very wealthy lawyers and partners, whose business was very secretive and looked after. When Mitch signed on to the firm they bought him a house with a very low interest rate and had it furnished by a interior designer and let his wife, Abby, choose the carpet and furniture, and the wallpaper, they also bought Mitch a black BMW. To top it all off they even paid off his student loans for him.

Little did Mitch know the Firm had a key to both the house and car. The board of the Firm got worried when an FBI agent by the name of Wayne Tarrence approached Mitch in a cafe asking questions and telling him not to trust any body at the firm. Not knowing what to do Mitch goes to the board of the firm and tells them most of the conversation that he and Tarrence, the FBI agent, had leaving out minor details that he thought he should keep to himself. Getting worried the people at the Firm decide to use the keys to Mitch’s car and house to gain access to his house without any body noticing so they could plant microphones and transmitters in his phones, the walls of every room in the house and in the attic.

Later on in the book, the head of the firm send Mitch on a business trip to the Caymans with another employee of the Firm. The head of the firm set it up so that Mitch and the other employee would meet two girls have dinner, a few drinks and maybe a little more might happen. Mitch doesn’t take the bait and ditches his date. As he is walking down the beach a young attractive women approaches him and they begin to talk. After a few more drinks Mitch decides nobody would find out and that there is nobody on the beach to see what happened. Little did Mitch know the firm had hired her too and they had taken pictures and everything to use against him.

This book is a perfect example of how large corporations can deceive and manipulate its employees with money and other ways of black mail. This book shows that deception is everywhere, including the legal system.

 

Dan Brown – The Lost Symbol

Taken from a review by http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/14/books/14maslin.html?_r=1

In short : Fasten Your Seat Belts, There’s Code to Crack

My Rating : 3.5/5

One of the theories espoused by Dan Brown’s new book is that when many people share the same thought, that thought can have physical effects. Let’s test it on Tuesday. Watch what happens to bloggers, booksellers, nitpickers, code crackers, conspiracy theorists, fans and overheated search engines when “The Lost Symbol,” Mr. Brown’s overdue follow-up to “Angels & Demons” (2000) and “The Da Vinci Code” (2003), finally sees the light of day.

As a man whose ideas have had their share of physical effects, Mr. Brown is well aware of how widely read and closely scrutinized “The Lost Symbol” will be. He even lets a character joke about this book’s guaranteed popularity. Dr. Katherine Solomon specializes in noetic science, with its focus on mind-body connections. She admits that her field is not widely known. But when her story comes out, she suggests, noetics could get the kind of public relations bump that Mr. Brown gave to the Holy Grail.

Dr. Solomon accompanies Robert Langdon, the rare symbologist who warrants the word dashing as both adjective and verb, through much of this novel, his third rip-snorting adventure. As Browniacs have long predicted, the chase involves the secrets of Freemasonry and is set in Washington, where some of those secrets are built into the architecture and are thus hidden in plain sight. Browniacs also guessed right in supposing that “The Lost Symbol” at one point was called “The Solomon Key.” That’s a much better title than the generic one it got.

So much for safe predictions. What no one could guess, despite all advance hints about setting and subject matter, was whether Mr. Brown could recapture his love of the game. Could he still tell a breathless treasure-hunt story? Could he lard it with weirdly illuminating minutiae? Could he turn some form of profound wisdom into a pretext for escapist fun? By now his own formula has been damaged by so much copycatting that it’s all but impossible for anyone to get it right.

Too many popular authors (Thomas Harris) have followed huge hits (“The Silence of the Lambs”) with terrible embarrassments (“Hannibal”). Mr. Brown hasn’t done that. Instead, he’s bringing sexy back to a genre that had been left for dead.

The new book clicks even if at first it looks dangerously like a clone. Here come another bizarre scene in a famous setting (the Capitol, not the Louvre), another string of conspiratorial secrets and another freakish-looking, masochistic baddie (tattooed muscleman, not albino monk) bearing too much resemblance to a comic-book villain. “If they only knew my power,” thinks this year’s version, a boastful psycho and cipher calling himself Mal’akh. “Tonight my transformation will be complete.”

Mal’akh appears in the stereotypically sinister prologue, disguising his identity as he is initiated into the highest echelon of Freemasonry. Next up is the return of Langdon, first seen here on a private plane en route to Washington. He has agreed on short notice to give a speech at the behest of Peter Solomon, Langdon’s mentor and Katherine’s brother. Why is Langdon in such demand? He’s barely off the plane when a woman brings up his last book, the one about the church and the sacred feminine: it seems to have created some kind of stir. “What a delicious scandal that one caused!” she says. “You do enjoy putting the fox in the henhouse!”

Langdon heads for the National Statuary Hall in the Capitol building, where he is to speak. And here comes Mr. Brown’s first neat trick: The Solomon summons was fake. There’s no audience waiting. Just as Langdon realizes he has been lured to Washington under a false pretext, a shriek arises from the Rotunda. Some fiend has deposited Peter Solomon’s severed, tattooed hand right above the Capitol Crypt — and right below the dome art that depicts George Washington, founding father and Freemason, as an ascending deity. “That hardly fits with the Christian underpinnings of this country,” huffs the tiny, irritating C.I.A. official who serves as this book’s Jar Jar Binks, when Langdon starts holding forth about the “Ancient Mysteries” the Capitol hides.

Meanwhile, at the Smithsonian Museum Support Center in Maryland (the book gives street addresses if you don’t want to wait for the official Dan Brown bus tours), Dr. Solomon is in her lab. It is located within an immense, highly guarded building that also houses Mars meteorite ALH-84001 and an architeuthis (a k a giant squid). And here it’s worth bringing up that Mr. Brown has a sideline as a walking crossword puzzle. His code- and clue-filled book is dense with exotica, from Futhark to Eiomahe to the Kubera Kolam. As for actual symbology, there’s a fabulous moment when Mal’akh has Langdon trapped in a box that is rapidly filling with water. He suddenly shows Langdon a 64-symbol-encoded grid. If Langdon doesn’t figure out its meaning in less than 60 seconds, he’ll stop breathing and something truly terrible will happen: We won’t get to hyperventilate through another mind-blowing Langdon story.

Mr. Brown’s splendid ability to concoct 64-square grids outweighs what might otherwise be authorial shortcomings. Within this book’s hermetically sealed universe, characters’ motivations don’t really have to make sense; they just have to generate the nonstop momentum that makes “The Lost Symbol” impossible to put down. So Mal’akh’s story is best not dissected beyond the facts that he is bad, self-tattooed, self-castrated and not Langdon’s friend.

Also, the author uses so many italics that even brilliant experts wind up sounding like teenage girls. And Mr. Brown would face an interesting creative challenge if the phrases “What the hell

…?,” “Who the hell … ?” and “Why the hell … ?” were made unavailable to him. The surprises here are so fast and furious that those phrases get quite the workout.

Then again, Mr. Brown’s excitable, hyperbolic tone is one the guilty pleasures of his books. (“ ‘Actually, Katherine, it’s not gibberish.’ His eyes brightened again with the thrill of discovery. ‘It’s … Latin.’ ”) It’s all in a day’s work for Langdon to ponder “a single solitary image that represented the illumination of the Egyptian sun god, the triumph of alchemical gold, the wisdom of the Philosopher’s Stone, the purity of the Rosicrucian Rose, the moment of the Creation, the All, the dominance of the astrological sun” and so much more in that cosmically mystical vein.

“The Lost Symbol” manages to take a twisting, turning route through many such aspects of the occult even as it heads for a final secret that is surprising for a strange reason: It’s unsurprising. It also amounts to an affirmation of faith. In the end it is Mr. Brown’s sweet optimism, even more than Langdon’s sleuthing and explicating, that may amaze his readers most.

Mr. Brown was writing sensational visual scenarios long before his books became movie material. This time he again enlivens his story with amazing imagery. Some particularly hot spots: the unusually suspense-generating setup for Katherine’s laboratory; the innards of the Library of Congress; the huge tank of the architeuthis; and two highly familiar tourist stops, both rendered newly breathtaking by Mr. Brown’s clever shifting of perspective. Thanks to him, picture postcards of the capital’s most famous monuments will never be the same.

Finally, there’s the jacket art for “The Lost Symbol,” its background covered with hundreds of symbols that form tiny coded inscriptions. These are so faint that in order to see them you need to pick up an actual copy of the book. You were probably going to do that anyhow.

 

Kane and Abel – A review

Kane and Abel

In the Holy Bible, Cain and Abel were the first and second sons of Adam and Eve. Cain commits the first murder on earth, by killing his brother Abel, after God rejects his sacrifice in favor of his brother.

In a way that was also the case of the first rivalry between human beings. Jeffrey Archer, picks this thread and comes up with a powerful bestseller, that takes it’s name from the two Biblical characters. Kane and Abel is the story of two men, born on the opposite sides of the Atlantic, in totally different circumstances, and the only thing common is that they are born on the same date, April 18,1906.

Plot

William Kane, is born with a silver spoon, into a wealth Boston Brahmin family. The Boston Brahmins so called, because they happen to be the richest and most educated families, and claim their descent from the founding fathers who founded the city of Boston. William’s father Richard Kane, was a highly successful banker himself.

Wladek Koskieciwz is raised by a family of trappers in rural Poland, who find him as an abandoned child in the woods. When he grows up, the local Baron Rosnowski, sires him and asks him to be a companion to his son Leon. Wladek agrees and also brings along his elder sister Florentyna. When WW1 breaks out, Poland is occupied by the German soldiers, and the Baron, along with his family is taken as prisoner. Leon is killed by one of the soldiers, while Florentyna is gang raped and killed by the soldiers. Before dying the Baron hands Wladek his silver band of authority, and that’s when Wladek realizes he is none other than the Baron’s illegitimate son. Wladek is taken to Siberia, from where he manages to escape to Turkey, and from there to the US. On his arrival in America as an immigrant, he adopts the name of Abel Rosnovski, and starts life as a waiter in the Hotel Plaza. The owner of the hotel, Davis Leroy is impressed by his work, and makes him the manager. Abel turns around the loss making hotel into a profitable one and becomes a stockholder.
During the Great Depression, Davis commits suicide, when he is unable to find a bank to support him financially. Before he dies Davis reveals to Abel, that Kane & Cabot, was the bank that didn’t support him. And that kick starts the rivalry between these two men. Abel marries his love Zaphia, and builds up a successful hotel empire. Kane in the meanwhile leads his bank to success. Abel however has not forgiven Kane, and he also joins hands with Henry Osborne, Kane’s step father in order to take revenge on him. Read the rest of the book to find out the fascinating tale of rivalry between these two men.

Characters

Wladek Kosckieciwz aka Abel Rosnovski, the illegal son of a Baron. A happy childhood but a very unhappy youth. He sees his sister gang raped and killed in front of him, his father and brother killed, and then he travels ticketless in a train to escape from Siberia. He is a person who comes from ground up, and this at times makes him ruthless, bitter and vengeful. Though an immigrant of US, he still loves his native Poland.

William Kane, though born into a rich family with all the comforts, still has an unhappy personal life. His father dies in the Titanic disaster when he is a kid, and his mother marries Henry Osborne, who turns out to be a rogue. He hates his stepfather and spends most of the time at Harvard with his best friend Mathew Lester. When his mother dies, he turns out Henry Osborne out.

Henry Osborne, Kane’s stepfather, a totally depraved and corrupt person. He marries Kane’s mother for her riches, and he wastes all her money, running into debts. He is turned out by Kane, and he later becomes a politician. Abel uses him in his fight against Kane, not knowing his true nature.

George, Abel’s companion on the voyage to US, and who later becomes his best friend and partner. He is the voice of reason to Abel’s often hot headed temperament. He stands by Abel throughout his life.

Florentyna Rosnovoski, Abel’s daughter, whom he names after his elder sister. She later falls in love with William Kane’s son Richard.
This was one book, that I could not put down, after I started to read it. Every passage just gripped me. Florentyna’s rape and murder by soldiers is horrifyingly described, and it does stun the reader. Abel’s escape from Siberia in a train, traveling without a ticket in the bathroom, and his rescue in Turkey is wonderfully described. So also is Kane’s showdown with Henry Osborne, after the death of his mother. As well as Kane confiding to his friend about his step father. Abel’s rise to riches is also well documented, as is the scene in the World War II, where Abel unknowingly rescues Kane.

The novel also skillfully intertwines actual incidents of the early 20th century with the lives of the two lead characters- the two World wars, the Great Depression, the Titanic disaster. Also Abel’s early life, wonderfully depicts the tragedy of Poland. No other country suffered as much as Poland during the early part of the 20th century. Both Russia and Germany exploited it to the maximum, and looted it completely. During the World War II, the Nazis totally destroyed this nation, and later during the Cold War, the Russians ruined it further. Most of the Polish cities were totally destroyed, and it had the maximum number of casualties during the War.

Also the novel examines the conflict between the established gentry and the immigrants in USA. Kane belonged to the Boston Brahmins, a privileged class, while Abel, made his fortunes right from the ground up. There was a clear class divide, in that many members of the elite class, would often look down upon the immigrants, and stereotype them. So Italians were lazy thieves, Irish were cunning, while Poles were downright stupid. Contrary to the general theory of US being an immigrants paradise, the reality was that immigrants had to face a lot of ridicule, discrimination and exploitation. In a way this really fired them and many of them later successfully integrated into the American society. But though they were successful, the elite never accepted them. They scorned them as lacking class, and noveau riche people. This attitude is seen in the case of William Kane, when he ridicules his son for falling in love with a stupid Pollack’s daughter.

On the flip side, the love story of Richard and Florentyna, is quite a yawn, and seems straight out of a Bollywood movie. Also the pace slacks a bit in the later half when Abel starts to make his fortune. But I would still recommend this book to read the fascinating tale of rivalry between these two men, which in a way is also the story of how America grew.

Overall Rating: 10/10

PS : Read this book before you die.

Courtesy: Mouthshut.com

 

Temple – Matthew Reilly

 

(Picture: Matt’s Official Website)

One of the blockbuster novels of M.R, Temple delivers great action, fast pace and everything that a good book needs to have. The book is divided into two different timelines – events that took place in the past and those that are happening – that occur on the same basis and intention. Matthew Reilly seamlessly integrates the past and the present along with clever twists and action that makes Temple as unputdownable as ever. Temple holds one of the top five places in my favourite list of books and I feel it is an honour to write a review of one of my favourite books. Now, let us see the synopsis of the great book.

The front cover says a simple statement “Some doors are meant to remain unopened”. As the story moves on, the reader gets to know what this means and I’ll definitely not state it in this blog. Ok, the synopsis of the book is given below:

“Deep in the jungles of Peru the contest of the century is underway. It’s a race to locate a legendary Incan idol – one carved out of a strange kind of stone. But a stone which, in the present age, could be used as the basis for a terrifying new weapon.

The US Army wants this prize at any cost. But they are not alone…

The only clue to the idol’s final resting place is to be found in a 400-year-old manuscript. Which introduces Professor William Race, a mild-mannered but brilliant linguist, who is unwillingly recruited to interpret the document that could lead the US team to the idol itself.

So begins the mission that will lead Race and his armed companions to a mysterious stone temple hidden in the foothills of the Andes. This is a carefully contrived sanctuary seething with menace and unexpected dangers. But it is not until the silence of the temple is breached that Race and his team discover they have broken a golden rule…

Some doors are meant to remain unopened.”

Mr. Reilly, I’m sorry, but though you write thick paperback books, I have to say that I finish them in less than a day.

Rennie Petersen from Amazon.com says

“I must admit that reviewing Temple isn’t easy for me.
My usual reviewing style is to pan a book for minor inconsistencies in the plot or for unrealistic characters or for a lack of accuracy in information presented as being historically correct. By these standards Temple deserves one star (at most).
But here I am giving Temple four stars despite it being the most blatantly unrealistic and totally improbable book I’ve ever read!”

“Reading a book by Matthew Reilly is like going to a liars convention, where the person who tells the most outlandish, unbelievable, crazy, entertaining story is the winner.

Several other reviewers have characterized Matthew Reilly’s books as "comic books in words". Exactly! They can also be compared to the old Batman TV shows, where the screen explodes with a "POW" when one of the characters punches another character.

Here’s an example of Matthew Reilly’s prose (page 434 in the paperback edition I read):
"Race hit him again, and again, and again – yelling with each punch as the Nazi staggered backwards.
‘Get -’
Punch.
‘- off -’
Punch.
‘- my -’
Punch.
‘- boat!’"

In conclusion, totally unrealistic, totally improbable and 100% entertaining!”

All I can tell you without spoiling anything is this: Will Race is a linguist, and some military types want to enlist his help on a secret project. Of course he agrees, at which point the adventure begins and never lets up until the very last page.
If you start this book, be prepared not to do anything else for a while. And make sure you read it someplace where you won’t be embarrassed to have people overhear you saying ‘Nawwww!’, ‘Whoa!’, ‘No way!’, and ‘Yee-haw!’
Way cool and lots of fun. Oh, and if you’re one of those girlyboys who whines about ‘character development’ and s**t like that, you are most definitely looking at the wrong book.

Courtesy: Amazon.com, matthewreilly.com