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*natalia* · 07-27-2005, 05:43 AM

"Holy Blood, Holy Grail" isn't without its critics either. I haven't read the book, but there was a Salon.com book review of "The Da Vinci Code" that also goes into HBHG. It's pretty interesting how intertwined the two books are -- how they are both best served by the notion that the books describe events that are part of the historical record when it comes to convincing the public about the "facts" in their tales, but how this complicates HBHG's author's attempts to go after Dan Brown for cribbing their ideas.

Here's a little excerpt from Laura Miller's review (You may have to click through an advertisement before reading the full article if you aren't a member:

"Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln are the Moriartys of pseudohistory, and "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" is their great triumph. Their techniques include burying their readers in chin-high drifts of factoids -- some valid but irrelevant, some uncheckable (the untranslated diaries of obscure 17th century clerics, and so on), others, like the labyrinthine family trees of various medieval French noblemen, simply numbing, and if you trouble to figure them out, pretty inconclusive. A preposterous idea will first be floated as a guess (it is "not inconceivable" that the Knights Templar found documentation of Jesus and Mary Magdalene's marriage in Jerusalem), then later presented as a tentative hypothesis, then still later treated as a fact that must be accounted for (the knights had to take those documents somewhere, so it must have been the south of France!)."

http://archive.salon.com/books/featu...de/index1.html

07-27-2005, 05:43 AM	#27
natalia Mrs. Bear Join Date: Jul 2005 Location: Cambridge, MA Posts: 455	"Holy Blood, Holy Grail" isn't without its critics either. I haven't read the book, but there was a Salon.com book review of "The Da Vinci Code" that also goes into HBHG. It's pretty interesting how intertwined the two books are -- how they are both best served by the notion that the books describe events that are part of the historical record when it comes to convincing the public about the "facts" in their tales, but how this complicates HBHG's author's attempts to go after Dan Brown for cribbing their ideas. Here's a little excerpt from Laura Miller's review (You may have to click through an advertisement before reading the full article if you aren't a member: "Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln are the Moriartys of pseudohistory, and "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" is their great triumph. Their techniques include burying their readers in chin-high drifts of factoids -- some valid but irrelevant, some uncheckable (the untranslated diaries of obscure 17th century clerics, and so on), others, like the labyrinthine family trees of various medieval French noblemen, simply numbing, and if you trouble to figure them out, pretty inconclusive. A preposterous idea will first be floated as a guess (it is "not inconceivable" that the Knights Templar found documentation of Jesus and Mary Magdalene's marriage in Jerusalem), then later presented as a tentative hypothesis, then still later treated as a fact that must be accounted for (the knights had to take those documents somewhere, so it must have been the south of France!)." http://archive.salon.com/books/featu...de/index1.html