I wasn’t going to read Dan Brown’s Inferno because, while I found The Da Vinci Code entertaining, his breakout book wasn’t very well written and contained too many holes. What held the book together was Brown’s use of engaging historical and art trivia well enough to make any conspiracy devote salivate. That worked for one book. I read Angels and Demons and I was done. I should have stayed done.
While dropping off some other books at my local library I spotted a copy of Brown’s latest on the front-end display and figured, what the heck, August was a good time for really, really light reading. I so wish I had that afternoon back.
So, what made me slam the book shut and, if the library hadn’t owned the book, throwing the time-waster across the field? To get into Brown’s writing you have to buy the minutiae (in many ways Brown’s books strike me as poorly plotted thrillers written by a wannabe Rick Steves), even when there are yellow butterflies involved. That works for me, I’m great at suspending disbelief. On page 294, however, Brown just flat out got his lie wrong. He wrote:
“These hypothetical ‘enhanced’ individuals are what Transhumanists refer to as Posthumans, which some believe will be the future of the species.”
“Sounds eerily like eugenics,” Langdon replied.
The reference made Sinskey’s skin crawl.
In the 1940s, Nazi scientists had dabbled in a technology they’d dubbed eugenics….
No. They didn’t—dabble or dub.
Eugenics existed outside of Germany before either Adolf Hitler or the Nazi party. The roots grew here in the 19th century and the Germans built on what we, and others, had already mapped out. Yes, we here in the United States can claim the lion’s share of the credit for this bit of gross social hubris.
That is an easily discovered fact by anyone interested in even a modicum of accuracy. If I can’t trust Brown on a fact this easy to check, how can I trust him on any of his previously fascinating asides.
Dan Brown, or one of his editors, should have spent 30-seconds on Google and not fallen prey to lazy history.
