Foucault's Pendulum - Umberto Eco

Suppose the course of human history in the last 500 years has been secretly directed towards the completion of a colossal master plan by global occult powers. The Templar Knights, the Rosicrucians, the Assassins, the Freemasons and most other conspiracy-theorist favourites were indeed involved. For ‘Foucault’s Pendulum’, Umberto Eco has concocted such a plot in convincing detail. This long novel follows the recollections of a young academic in Milan, Causabon, who believes he has uncovered a grand hermetic plan. With two colleagues at a book publishing house Causabon constructs a huge theory that combines and explains many existing theories. By ...  Read the complete review

Foucault's Pendulum is an excellent book - it is something like an intellectual DeVinci Code or something. History buffs and those who like to imagine will like this book because it incorporates many many things from history - cults, sects, battles, emperors, languages, religions and more. If you are a silly fanatic who gets offended by anything, then this isn't for you - go watch Sesame Street. Yes the book does slag off the Jews, the Muslims and the Christians all over the place - and it does it so classily. The plot follows a few crazy book editors who start feeding a computer random pieces of information, which it then spits out in ...  Read the complete review

What a fascinating books ... Umberto Eco is probably known most for his "medieval thriller" called "The Name of the Rose" or rather for the film version starring Sean Connery which doesn't quite do justice to the book. Although "The Name of the Rose" definitely is a very great book, "Foucault's Pendulum" certainly deserves to be called greater. When I started reading the book, it took me a few chapters to get used to the great amount of information that is given to the reader very quickly - but it did not take me too long to get used to this and to be entirely involved in the story before I even realised it had ...  Read the complete review

?The Name of the Rose? is a story of an ingenious Franciscan monk named William of Baskerville and an innocent Benedictine novice called Adso of Melk. These persons are supposed to be investigating a suspected heresy in an isolated but rich abbey of the Medieval Period. Nevertheless, at the end, they turn to be detectives of a series of crime in the abbey when the abbot of the abbey asked William?s support to handle the case. Through the use of ?reason?, with the help of the ideas of Roger bacon and the logic of Aristotle, they solve the mystery of a series of murders patterned after verses in the Apocalypse. The author is surely cunning in having thought ...  Read the complete review