Author | Geraldine Brooks |
---|---|
Language | English |
Genre | Historical fiction |
Publisher | Viking Penguin |
Publication date | January 1, 2008 |
Publication place | United States |
Media type | Print (hardcover) |
Pages | 372 pages |
ISBN | 978-0-670-01821-5 |
OCLC | 123912702 |
People of the Book is a 2008 historical novel by Geraldine Brooks. The story focuses on imagined events surrounding the protagonist and real historical past of the still-extant Sarajevo Haggadah, one of the oldest surviving Jewish illuminated texts. [1]
The novel tells the fictional story of Dr. Hanna Heath, an Australian book conservator who comes to Sarajevo to restore the Haggadah. Her work on the book leaves her with questions: why is the book illustrated, unlike other Haggadot? Why was the last restoration job, a hundred years earlier, done so poorly? What happened to the metal clasps that once held the parchment pages pressed together? How did the Haggadah come from fifteenth-century Spain to the Balkans? In the course of the restoration she takes microscopic samples: fragments of a butterfly's wing caught in the spine, a long white cat hair tangled in the binding, traces of salt crystals, a wine stain mixed with blood.
The story alternates between showing Hanna researching the Haggadah in the present, searching archives and taking her samples to forensic labs, and following the history of the Haggadah across five hundred years, in reverse chronological order, revealing the (fictional) explanations for all of Hanna's discoveries. [2]
The book's Afterword briefly explains which parts of the novel are based on fact and which are imaginary. Geraldine Brooks wrote an article for The New Yorker that provides more details about the Sarajevo Haggadah and its real-life rescuers, especially Dervis Korkut, who hid it from the Nazis. It also explains that Lola, the young Jewish guerrilla fighter in the novel, is based on a real person named Mira Papo, who was sheltered by Dervis Korkut and his wife Servet. [3]
The novel has been compared with Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code , with USA Today calling it an erudite version of Brown's work; other reviewers observed that it is slower paced, that there are no cliffhangers, and that readers "are never convinced ... by Hanna's contrived and clichéd personal story". [1] [4] [5]
In 2008, it won the Australian Book Industry Award (ABIA) Book of the Year and Literary Fiction Book of the Year. [6]
Daniel Gerhard Brown is an American author best known for his thriller novels, including the Robert Langdon novels Angels & Demons (2000), The Da Vinci Code (2003), The Lost Symbol (2009), Inferno (2013), and Origin (2017). His novels are treasure hunts that usually take place over a period of 24 hours. They feature recurring themes of cryptography, art, and conspiracy theories. His books have been translated into 57 languages and, as of 2012, have sold over 200 million copies. Three of them, Angels & Demons, The Da Vinci Code, and Inferno, have been adapted into films, while one of them, The Lost Symbol, was adapted into a television show.
Robert Langdon is a fictional character created by author Dan Brown for his Robert Langdon book series: Angels & Demons (2000), The Da Vinci Code (2003), The Lost Symbol (2009), Inferno (2013) and Origin (2017). He is a Harvard University professor of Religious Iconology and "symbology".
Geraldine Brooks is an Australian-American journalist and novelist whose 2005 novel March won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Paul L. Maier is an American historian and novelist. He has written several works of scholarly and popular non-fiction about Christianity and novels about Christian historians. He is the former Russell H. Seibert Professor of Ancient History at Western Michigan University, from which he retired in 2011, retaining the title of professor emeritus in the Department of History. He previously served as Third Vice President of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod.
The Da Vinci Code is a 2006 mystery thriller film directed by Ron Howard, written by Akiva Goldsman, and based on Dan Brown's 2003 novel of the same name. The first in the Robert Langdon film series, the film stars Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou, Ian McKellen, Alfred Molina, Jürgen Prochnow, Jean Reno, and Paul Bettany. In the film, Robert Langdon, a professor of religious symbology from Harvard University, is the prime suspect in the grisly and unusual murder of Louvre curator Jacques Saunière. On the body, the police find a disconcerting cipher and start an investigation. Langdon escapes with the assistance of police cryptologist Sophie Neveu, and they begin a quest for the legendary Holy Grail. Sir Leigh Teabing, a noted British Grail historian, tells them that the actual Holy Grail is explicitly encoded in Leonardo da Vinci's wall painting The Last Supper. Also searching for the Grail is a secret cabal within Opus Dei, an actual prelature of the Holy See, who wish to keep the true Grail a secret to prevent the destruction of Christianity.
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The Sarajevo Haggadah is an illuminated manuscript that contains the illustrated traditional text of the Passover Haggadah which accompanies the Passover Seder. It belongs to a group of Spanish-Provençal Sephardic Haggadahs, originating "somewhere in northern Spain", most likely the city of Barcelona, around 1350, and is one of the oldest of its kind in the world.
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The Da Vinci Code, a popular suspense novel by Dan Brown, generated criticism and controversy after its publication in 2003. Many of the complaints centered on the book's speculations and misrepresentations of core aspects of Christianity and the history of the Catholic Church. Additional criticisms were directed toward the book's inaccurate descriptions of European art, history, architecture, and geography.
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The Da Vinci Code is a 2003 mystery thriller novel by Dan Brown. It is Brown's second novel to include the character Robert Langdon: the first was his 2000 novel Angels & Demons. The Da Vinci Code follows symbologist Langdon and cryptologist Sophie Neveu after a murder in the Louvre Museum in Paris entangles them in a dispute between the Priory of Sion and Opus Dei over the possibility of Jesus and Mary Magdalene having had a child together.
A Perfect Vacuum is a 1971 book by Polish author Stanisław Lem, the largest and best known collection of Stanisław Lem's fictitious criticism of nonexisting books. It was translated into English by Michael Kandel. Some of the reviews remind the reader of drafts of his science fiction novels, some read like philosophical pieces across scientific topics, from cosmology to the pervasiveness of computers, finally others satirize and parody everything from the nouveau roman to pornography, Ulysses, authorless writing, and Dostoevsky.
Angels & Demons is a 2009 American mystery thriller film directed by Ron Howard and written by Akiva Goldsman and David Koepp, based on Dan Brown's 2000 novel of the same title. It is the sequel to the 2006 film The Da Vinci Code, also directed by Howard, and the second installment in the Robert Langdon film series; however, the novel version was published before The Da Vinci Code novel.
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The New Yorkers is a musical written by Cole Porter and Herbert Fields (book). Star Jimmy Durante also wrote the words and music for the songs in which his character was featured.
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, published as Holy Blood, Holy Grail in the United States, is a book by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. The book was first published in 1982 by Jonathan Cape in London as an unofficial follow-up to three BBC Two TV documentaries that were part of the Chronicle series. The paperback version was first published in 1983 by Corgi books. A sequel to the book, called The Messianic Legacy, was originally published in 1986. The original work was reissued in an illustrated hardcover version with new material in 2005.
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Derviš Korkut was a Bosnian Muslim scholar and humanist. A librarian and curator of the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, he is famous for saving the Sarajevo Haggadah from the Nazis and Ustashas during the Holocaust in the Independent State of Croatia, a Nazi German puppet state in Yugoslavia during World War II.