Word: symbolically
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Many a jaded commentator saw Obama's Tuesday meeting with Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas as a symbol of surrender to Netanyahu's refusal of the U.S. demand that Israel halt all construction on land conquered in 1967. Instead, Netanyahu offered a partial and time-limited freeze and appeared to force the President of the United States to back down. For Abbas, the handshake with Netanyahu orchestrated by Obama was viewed as a humiliating climbdown from his refusal to talk to the Israelis until they implemented that settlement freeze. (Read about the photo-op peace process...
...Symbol of Resilience These days juritza makes a living as a tour guide and one-man antidote to ostalgie. But the bulk of Berlin's tourist industry colludes in revisionism, selling Berlin's history to visitors in meaningless lumps, like the wall peckers hawking pieces of the Wall. Yet just as you despair that Germany will ever escape its conflicted sense of the past, the Wall trail crosses the River Spree, and symbols of the nation's astounding resilience come into view. The Reichstag, opened in 1894 when Germany was a young nation-state, and later burned as the Nazis...
...Unlike the first two Langdon novels, The Lost Symbol (Doubleday; 509 pages) doesn't deal with the history of the Christian church. The mythology Langdon is decoding is that of the Freemasons (whose motto ordo ab chao, order out of chaos, could be Brown's). Langdon is summoned - dude is always getting summoned - to Washington, D.C., by a mysterious phone call that he thinks is coming from his old friend and mentor Peter Solomon, head of the Smithsonian. Langdon thinks he's going to give a speech at a Smithsonian fundraiser at the Capitol building. But when he shows...
...plot of The Lost Symbol churns forward with a brutalist energy that makes character but a flesh appendage on its iron machine. It's fun, but you feel a little bruised afterward. Langdon must ransack the Capitol for his missing friend Peter Solomon, the one who lost the hand, and for a hidden Masonic pyramid, which is the key to some mystical wisdom that will turn man into god, which is something that Mal'akh, the tattooed nut job, has a keen interest in. Langdon is joined by the head of the CIA's Office of Security, who for some...
...Brown has another agenda in The Lost Symbol, which is to rehabilitate Washington, D.C., as one of the great world capitals of gothic mystery, one that can hold its own with Paris or London or Rome. "America has a hidden past," Langdon thinks, italically. "Every time Langdon lectured on the symbology of America, his students were confounded to hear that the true intentions of our nation's forefathers had absolutely nothing to do with what so many politicians now claimed. America's intended destiny has been lost to history...