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Title: Digital Fortress by Dan Brown ISBN: 1593973594 Publisher: Audio Renaissance Pub. Date: January, 2004 Format: Audio CD Volumes: 5 List Price(USD): $29.95

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Average Customer Rating: 3.92

Rating: 5
Summary: Factual, Fast, and Fun
Comment: I was introduced to the books of author Dan Brown only three weeks ago, but have quickly absorbed all four of his published works. It is easy to see why some are comparing the work of Dan Brown and James BeauSeigneur (THE CHRIST CLONE TRILOGY). Both Brown and BeauSeigneur deal masterfully with the more mysterious features of religion, politics, and science. Both bring to light amazing bits of information, which they weave into the intricate patterns of their stories. Both are highly imaginative and write with a ring of authenticity that makes for a compelling read. While Brown compresses labyrinthine plots into brief time periods to provide page-turning suspense, BeauSeigneur trilogy is of epic proportion, covering several decades. While Brown applies the mysteries of history to the drama of "today," BeauSeigneur uses both history and prophecy (from perhaps a dozen major world religions) to transport the reader from the world of today, to the very dawning of a new age in a story reminiscent of the scope of Asimov's classic, FOUNDATION.

One other difference is that BeauSeigneur has taken the novel (pun intended and forgiveness is asked) approach of including footnotes in his books of fiction. By doing so, he all but eliminates the necessity of suspending disbelief. Few authors employ such strong factual grounding as to make footnotes useful, but I believe Brown's work (and his readers) would benefit from BeauSeigneur's innovation.

Rating: 5
Summary: Codes, ciphers, Enigma, American Black Chamber.......
Comment: Codes, ciphers, Enigma, American Black Chamber.....If any of these words intrigue you then Digital Fortress by Dan Brown might just be a book for you. For many years I have been interested in all facets of intelligence, from David Kahn's book, The Codebreakers to James Bamford's, The Puzzle Palace. These works described the processes from breaking codes and ciphers to how one of America's most secret organizations orchestrates the massive responsibility of gathering and interpreting all type and matter of intelligence. Dan Brown has done his research well in the creation of this novel. He has created characters that are very down to earth and very believable. The story itself is centered around the NSA, National Security Agency, how it operates, what it does and what it would like to do. Susan Fletcher a very intelligent and beautiful intellectual who is the head of the Crypto Group and her boyfriend David Becker, a university professor with a proclivity for languages, get entangled in some very interesting and dangerous situations. The action comes very fast and is well written. Brown puts several twists into this tale of the intelligence world and how it totally revolves around high powered computers and unbreakable algorithms. If you are a fan of techno fiction than you will find this a great and entertaining read. Beware ! The book is reminiscent of the movie "The Sting". You'll know what I mean when you get there.

Rating: 4
Summary: Do your research!
Comment: I know nothing about cryptography or supercomputers, so I can't tell whether there are major or minor inaccuracies in Brown's descriptions of them (though, judging from the reviews, there are.)

But I do know a little bit about Japanese, and in the first few pages of the novel there is a bit about how Becker is decoding into Mandarin Chinese, and suddenly tells them that all the characters he has translated are also part of "Kanji language," a Japanese writing system, and that in "Kanji language" these Chinese characters have different meanings. All wrong. No one calls it "kanji language," for starters. And characters used in Japanese as kanji (the word means "Chinese characters") have the same meaning in Japanese as they do in Chinese. If you had a sequence of kanji, you would be missing a lot of grammar in Japanese, but the meaning would be clear. It would be like a sequence of nouns and verbs, maybe adjectives. A first year student of Japanese could have explained it to Brown.

So when I see a flaw like that on page 9, I wonder how he did with the far more technical stuff.

But his plot tricks are clever, and I read the whole thing with a grain of salt and enjoyed the ride. Not as good as Da Vinci and Angels and Demons; closer to Deception Point. He's got me hooked on thrillers, however, and now I'll have to find another author to read.