BOOK REVIEW: INFERNO by Dan Brown
First Published in Daily Times / (Pakistan) / 1 June 2013 Reproduced in The Kashmir Moniter Fans who have kept up with Robert Langdon, our favorite symbologist/iconologist on quests that take him to the Vatican, Paris or Washington, will willingly join the professor jogging through the picturesque streets of Florence. Even when he claims to have a sad case of amnesia, no way of telling the time (his signature time piece lost), and a wily assassin on his tail, he is a force of nature. It is a part he was born to play. And in Dan Brown’s murky universe, it is one he reprises at the first sign of an anagram. The author uses the sorry state of mankind as a launch pad to project his ominous design, decrypt a Renaissance painting and set a controversial debate in motion. His novel provides delicious historical context as it plumbs the depths of Dante’s tortured soul and his savage interpretation of hell, helpfully illustrated by Botticelli ( and available for viewing on iPad’s Da...