Assignment

Communication Skills

Book Review

On

The RULE of  four

Name:Gajjar Darshit H.

Branch: IT

Sem: 1^st

Year: 2016-2017

      Enr.no.:160210116009

      Key facts:

(1)Title: THE RULE OF FOUR

(2)Author: Ian Caldwell and  Dustin Thomason  Joint Author

(3)Publisher:

(4)Date Of Publication:Arrow books 2005                                                                                                                                                                                                           

(5)Price: 180/-

(6)Copyright: © 2004

(7)ISBN: 0099451956

(8)Protagonist:

(9)Antagonist:

(10)Theme: FRIENDSHIP

 About The Author

v    AUTHOR:IAN CALDWELL

Born	March 18, 1976 (age 40)
Occupation	Novelist
Alma mater	Princeton University
Genres	Historical Fiction, Thriller, Mystery
Notable works	The Rule of Four The Fifth Gospel
Spouse	Meredith
Children	Ethan, Jude, Luke

 Plot:-

The Rule of Four, a debut novel by recent Ivy League grads Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason, is comparable to numerous recently published thrillers (Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, Leslie Silbert's The Intelligencer, Lev Grossman's Codex, etc.) in which protagonists are put in mortal danger while trying to unravel cryptic secrets hidden in ancient texts. It would be an injustice, however, to categorize this novel as typical bibliophilic suspense. The Rule of Four is much more than that it's a masterfully complicated mystery, a powerfully touching romance and a cultural account of the Renaissance, as well as a bittersweet coming-of-age story about college seniors coming to grips with the "adult" world.


Tom Sullivan and Paul Harris are students at Princeton University. Paul enlists Tom's help in researching his senior thesis on the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a real-life, renowned, shelf-bending Renaissance manuscript attributed to an enigmatic Italian nobleman. Written in seven languages with gruesome illustrations, Hypnerotomachia has mystified academics for more than five centuries. Tom, whose late father was a scholar obsessed with the text, finds that he, too, is drawn to its tantalizing secrets. What he and Paul discover is a revelation so incredible some would murder to possess it.


Readers who enjoy cipher-powered story lines will delight in Caldwell and Thomason's acrostics, anagrams, riddles and polyalphabetic cryptography. But this novel is ultimately powered by the deep relationships between the handful of protagonists, and the things they will do to sustain their friendship. The theme of responsibility increasingly prominent as the seniors near graduation (and potential incarceration) is epitomized by a professor's remark about writing the senior thesis: it's about shouldering something so big, you can't get out from under it.


Riveting, poignant and intensely intimate, The Rule of Four is a thinking person's thriller of the highest order.

Paul Goat Allen is a freelance editor and writer living in Syracuse, New York.

 Theme In Detail

This is a suspense novel about a Princeton student, Tom Sullivan, who is coming of age with his three college friends. As they all complete their senior thesis, Tom must face his past and the death of his father. Paul Harris, Tom's roommate is a brilliant senior who is on the verge of solving a 500 year old riddle written in a book called the Hypnerotomachia. Paul is solving the book's riddles and is on the verge of uncovering some of the world's yet unknow Renaissance treasure. Tom must help Paul solve the mysteries hidden in the book because Tom's father devoted his life to investigating the same book before his tragic death. Mysterious deaths and threats dog the students as they race to solve the riddles hidden within the book before they become victims to the book's allure and tragic ending. The story take place within the tradition rich Princeton campus but also within the beauty and wisdom of the Renaissance era.

         My Observation

An Ivy League murder, a mysterious coded manuscript, and the secrets of a Renaissance prince collide memorably in The Rule of Four—a brilliant work of fiction that weaves together suspense and scholarship, high art and unimaginable treachery.

It's Easter at Princeton. Seniors are scrambling to finish their theses. And two students, Tom Sullivan and Paul Harris, are a hair's breadth from solving the mysteries of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili—a renowned text attributed to an Italian nobleman, a work that has baffled scholars since its publication in 1499. For Tom, their research has been a link to his family's past—and an obstacle to the woman he loves. For Paul, it has become an obsession, the very reason for living. But as their deadline looms, research has stalled—until a long-lost diary surfaces with a vital clue. And when a fellow researcher is murdered just hours later, Tom and Paul realize that they are not the first to glimpse the Hypnerotomachia's secrets.

Suddenly the stakes are raised, and as the two friends sift through the codes and riddles at the heart of the text, they are beginnning to see the manuscript in a new light—not simply as a story of faith, eroticism and pedantry, but as a bizarre, coded mathematical maze. And as they come closer and closer to deciphering the final puzzle of a book that has shattered careers, friendships and families, they know that their own lives are in mortal danger. Because at least one person has been killed for knowing too much. And they know even more.

From the streets of fifteenth-century Rome to the rarified realm of the Ivy League, from a shocking 500 year-old murder scene to the drama of a young man's coming of age, The Rule of Four takes us on an entertaining, illuminating tour of history—as it builds to a pinnacle of nearly unbearable suspense.