If you love mind gaems, intricate puzzles, the curiousities of history, and strange imaginings, you'll be fascinated by FOUCAULT'S PENDULUM, an elaborate maze of a book by the author of the huge bestseller THE NAME OF THE ROSE.
There are demonstraton models of Foucault's Pendulum in science museums across the United States and in Europe - my favorite is at the Musee des Arts et Metiers in Paris - a museum of technology and human endeavor lodged in an ancient clerical building - it's a fabulous combination of the practical and the metaphysical.
Teri Henry, Director, Subsidiary Rights
As brilliant and quirky as
The Name of the Rose, as mischievous and wide-ranging . . . A virtuoso performance.
San Francisco Chronicle A literary joke plunges its creators into mortal danger in this captivating intellectual thriller by celebrated author Umberto Eco.
A Colonel Ardenti starts it all: He tells three editors that he has discovered a coded message about a centuries-old Knights Templar plan to tap a mystic source of power greater than atomic energy. The editors, bored with rewriting crackpot manuscripts on the occult and amused by his fantastic claims, decide to cook up a Plan of their own. Into their computer they feed manuscript pages on Satanic initiation rites, Rosicrucianism, the measurements of the Great Pyramid and out comes a map indicating a point from which all the powers of the earth can be controlled, a point located at Foucault s Pendulum in Paris. A terrific joke, they think. Until people begin to disappear mysteriously, starting with the colonel . . .
An encyclopedic detective story about a search for the center of an ancient, still-living conspiracy of men who seek not merely power over the earth but the power of the earth itself . . . An intellectual triumph. Anthony Burgess,
The New York Times Book Review UMBERTO ECO is a professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna and the bestselling author of numerous novels and essays. He lives in Milan.
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