Inside Angels & Demons
The Unauthorized Guide to the International Bestseller
by
Dan Burstein and Arne de Keijzer

CONTRIBUTORS

Amir D. Aczel was a professor of mathematics and statistics at Bentley College in Waltham, Massachusetts, from 1988 to 2003; was a Visiting Scholar in the History of Science at Harvard University in 2007; and currently serves as a professor of mathematics at the University of New Hampshire. His works of nonfiction include the international bestseller Fermat's Last Theorem, translated into nineteen languages. His other books include The Mystery of the Aleph, Entanglement: The Greatest Mystery in Physics, The Artist and the Mathematician, and The Jesuit and the Skull: Teilhard de Chardin, Evolution, and the Search for Peking Man. Aczel is a frequent guest on the lecture circuit, radio, and television. In 2004 he received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship to support the writing of Descartes' Secret Notebook, which was published in 2005.

Diane Apostolos-Cappadona is an adjunct professor of religious art and cultural history at the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding and an adjunct professor of art and culture in the Liberal Studies Program of Georgetown University. A widely published cultural historian specializing in the study of religious art, she is currently completing a book, Mary Magdalene Imaged Through the Centuries, Or How the Anonymous Became the Magdalene. She contributed the foreword for the reprint edition of Sacred and Profane Beauty: The Holy in Art by Gerardus van der Leeuw, and is editing two anthologies of sources and documents in the history of Christian art and symbolism. Professor Apostolos-Cappadona also contributed to the previous book in this series, Secrets of the Code.

Michael Barkun is a professor of political science in the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. He has written widely on conspiracy theories, terrorism, and millennial and apocalyptic movements. His book A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America was published by the University of California Press in 2003 and published in Japan a year later. He has also written Religion and the Racist Right, Crucible of the Millennium, and Disaster and the Millennium. Barkun's essay "Religion and Secrecy After September 11," on new issues in the relationship between government and religious communities, was published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion in June, 2006. Barkun has served as a consultant to the FBI and is the recipient of fellowships and grants from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Paul Berger is a British freelance journalist based in Brooklyn, New York. His articles have appeared in a range of newspapers, magazines and websites, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, Forbes, Movie Maker, and Online Journalism Review. He is also the contributing editor of five books, including All The Money in the World: How The Forbes 400 Make - and Spend - Their Fortunes and the New York Times bestseller Secrets of the Code. He writes a blog, Englishman in New York, at http://pdberger.com.

Amy D. Bernstein is a writer and academic who specializes in Renaissance literature and history. A graduate of Wellesley College, she earned her doctorate from Oxford University in sixteenth-century French literature. Her doctoral work, completed in 2004, comprised a new edition of the sonnets of Jacques de Billy de Prunay, a Benedictine monk, author, and translator of Gregory of Nazianzus and other patristic writers. She has also written for US News & World Report, contributed to Secrets of the Code, and edited Quotations from Speaker Newt: The Red, White and Blue Book of the Republican Revolution.

Peter W. Bernstein, a partner with Annalyn Swan in ASAP Media, was a contributing editor for this book. Founded in 2003, ASAP Media is a media development firm whose clients include Reader's Digest Association, US News & World Report, and the Boston Globe, as well as other companies and nonprofit organizations. Before founding ASAP he served as an editor at US News & World Report and Fortune magazine. He was also publisher of Times Books, a division of Random House, Inc. In addition, he is a bestselling author. He is the editor and publisher of The Ernst & Young Tax Guide, the country's number one annual tax guide. He coauthored the Practical Guide to Practically Everything and, with his wife Amy, edited Quotations from Speaker Newt: The Red, White and Blue Book of the Republican Revolution.

James Carlisle, PhD, is a venture capital investor, an adviser to CEOs, a scientist, and a serial entrepreneur. Jim has done defense research funded by ONR, DARPA, NSF, the RAND Corporation, and the Department of Defense. He has designed advanced decision support systems for executives of major corporations as well as the US secretary of defense. He has an engineering degree from Princeton and a PhD from Yale. Jim's current investing and research activity includes biometrics applications for homeland defense, access, home automation, medical diagnosis, product marketing, and inventory control. He is a managing partner at Graystone Capital.

Jennifer Carlisle, the author of B.I.S. Biometric Identification System: A Radical Proposal for Solving the Identity Problem in a Time of Heightened Security, is an expert in biometrics, international security, and economics. She is CEO of Anzen Research, which recently completed a study on the use of biometric identity verification of passengers and employees for access control at airports. She graduated with honors degrees in international relations and economics from the University of Southern California. She has taught science and history to probation students and worked in marketing for Credit Suisse and for a dot-com later acquired by Answerthink Consulting. She is currently a graduate student at the London School of Economics.

John Castro is a New York City-based writer, editor, and researcher. He has worked on publications by civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, financial journalist Marshall Loeb, and Internet entrepreneur Charles Ferguson. John is also a theater director, actor, and playwright, with a particular love of Shakespeare. John contributed to the previous book in this series, Secrets of the Code.

John Dominic Crossan, a monk for nineteen years (and a priest for the last twelve years of that time), was also a university professor for twenty-six years. He has written more than twenty books on early Christianity and has been translated into ten foreign languages, including Korean, Chinese, and Japanese. His most recent, God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now, was published by HarperOne in 2007. He lectures to lay and scholarly audiences across the United States as well as in Australia, England, Finland, Ireland, New Zealand, Scandinavia, and South Africa. He is interviewed regularly about religious matters by both print and electronic media. In 2007 Crossan received the Albert Schweitzer Memorial Award for Outstanding Accomplishment in the Critical Study of Religion.

Paul Davies works at Arizona State University as a professor and director of the research center BEYOND: Center for Fundamental Concepts in Physics. He previously held academic appointments in astronomy, physics, mathematics, and astrobiology at the universities of Cambridge, London, Newcastle upon Tyne, Adelaide, and Macquarie. His research has spanned the fields of cosmology, gravitation, and quantum field theory, with particular emphasis on black holes and the origin of the universe. He has written more than twenty-five books, including Other Worlds, The Edge of Infinity, God and the New Physics, and The Mind of God. He was awarded the Templeton Prize in 1995.

Richard Dawkins, the International Cosmos prizewinner for 1997, is the first holder of the Charles Simonyi Chair in the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford. Professor Dawkins's first book, The Selfish Gene, became an immediate bestseller and The Blind Watchmaker won the Royal Society of Literature Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Among his other bestsellers are The God Delusion, Climbing Mount Improbable, Unweaving the Rainbow, and The Ancestor's Tale. Professor Dawkins's awards have also included the Silver Medal of the Zoological Society of London, the Royal Society's Michael Faraday Award, the Nakayama Prize for Achievement in Human Science, and the Kistler Prize. He has honorary doctorates in both literature and science and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature as well as a fellow of the Royal Society.

Hannah de Keijzer is a graduate of Swarthmore College, where she pursued her interests in cognitive science and religion. As a writer and editor she has worked for the publishers David R. Godine and Squibnocket Partners. A publisher herself, she started Bell Buoy Press as a showcase for her collages and other art work. Also a dancer, she was a founder of the Green Chair Dance Group, a professional company based in Philadelphia.

David Downie is a Europe-based freelance write, editor, and translator. His topics are European culture, travel, and food, and his articles have appeared in more than fifty magazine and newspapers worldwide. He is the author of several fiction and nonfiction books, including the critically acclaimed cookbook, Cooking the Roman Way: Authentic Recipes from the Home Cooks and Trattoria of Rome. His most recent collection of travel essays is entitled Paris, Paris: Journey into the City of Light, and his food lover's guidebook to Rome, where he has spent part of each year since childhood, is coming out in paperback in February, 2009. Downie also contributed to the previous book in this series, Secrets of the Code.

Glenn W. Erickson has taught philosophy at Southern Illinois University, Texas A&M University, Western Carolina University, and the Rhode Island School of Design, as well as at five federal universities in Brazil and Nigeria, sometimes as a Fulbright Scholar. He is author of a dozen works about philosophy (Negative Dialectics and the End of Philosophy), logic (Dictionary of Paradox, with John Fossa), literary criticism (A Tree of Stories, with his wife Sandra S. F. Erickson), poetry, short fiction, art history (New Theory of the Tarot), and the history of mathematics. Erickson also contributed to the previous book in this series, Secrets of the Code.

Owen Gingerich is professor emeritus of astronomy and of the history of science at Harvard University and a senior astronomer emeritus at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. He is a leading authority on German astronomer Johannes Kepler and on Nicolaus Copernicus. Professor Gingerich has edited, translated, or written twenty books and hundreds of articles and reviews. He is the author of God's Universe and The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus , the result of a three-decade-long personal survey of Copernicus's book Revolutions. He and his wife live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and are avid travelers, photographers, and rare book and shell collectors.

Marcelo Gleiser is the Appleton Professor of Natural Philosophy in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Dartmouth College. He has been a research fellow at Fermilab as well as at the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of California. He is the recipient of a Presidential Faculty Fellows Award from the White House and National Science Foundation, one of only fifteen scientists to receive the award. He has been featured in numerous television programs, including the PBS documentary Stephen Hawking's Universe. Gleiser is author of The Prophet and the Astronomer: Apocalyptic Science and the End of the World, and The Dancing Universe: From Creation Myths to the Big Bang. He is currently working on a historical novel based on the life and work of Johannes Kepler.

Deirdre Good is a professor of the New Testament at the General Theological Seminary in New York City. She reads Greek, Coptic, Latin, Hebrew, and some Aramaic. She has a special interest in the Greek language found in the book of Matthew and its use of both Greek idioms from the Greek translation of Hebrew scriptures (the Septuagint) and Hebrew idioms that are rendered into Greek by the author of Matthew. Her book Jesus the Meek King appeared in 1999 and her Mariam, the Magdalen, and the Mother was published in 2005. Good's book, Beginning New Testament Study, with Bruce Chilton, will be published in 2009. She is a contributor to the blog Episcopal Café (www.episcopalcafe.com).

Dean Hamer has done work on the biology of sexual orientation, thrill seeking, anxiety, anger, and addiction. His books on these topics, Science of Desire and Living with Our Genes, were bestsellers in the science category. Recently, Dr. Hamer has become interested in spirituality. In his new book, The God Gene, he argues that our inclination toward religious faith is no accident; it is hardwired into our genes. Chief of gene structure and regulation at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, Hamer has worked at the National Institutes of Health for more than two decades. He has appeared in national and international newspapers, magazines, and documentaries. Dr. Hamer is also a frequent TV guest.

Steven J. Harris received his BA in physics and PhD in the history of science. He has taught at Harvard University, Brandeis University, Wellesley College, and Boston College, winning two awards for outstanding teaching. His main areas of interest are the scientific revolution, the history of astronomy and cosmology, and especially the scientific activity of members of the Society of Jesus in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Harris is coeditor of a two-volume collection of essays on Jesuit cultural history and is the author of several essays on the history of Jesuit science. Several of the points made in his interview in this book are developed in his essay "Roman Catholicism and Science Since Trent," in The History of Science and Religion in the Western Tradition.

Michael Herrera is a freelance writer based in Denver, Colorado. He has an undergraduate degree in history and spent several years pursuing a PhD in early Christianity before leaving academia for a career in high-tech public relations.

Stephan Herrera is a New York-based journalist with eighteen years of experience writing about science and technology for the likes of The Economist, Nature, Forbes, Red Herring, and the Acumen Journal of Science. He is the former life sciences editor at MIT's Technology Review magazine. He is also at work on a book, entitled Closer to God: The Fantastic Voyage of Nanotechnology. Stephan earned his undergraduate degree in economics and management at Colorado State University and his master's degree at Columbia University in the Graduate School of Journalism.

George Johnson writes about science for the New York Times and other publications from Santa Fe, New Mexico, and is winner of the AAAS Science Journalism Award. His books include Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order, Architects of Fear: Conspiracy Theories and Paranoia in American Politics, and Miss Leavitt's Stars: The Untold Story of the Woman Who Discovered How to Measure the Universe. His most recent book, The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments, was published in 2008 by Knopf. He is codirector of the Santa Fe Science-Writing Workshop and can be reached on the Web at talaya.net.

Scott Kim has been a full-time independent designer of visual puzzles and games for the Web, computer games, magazines, and toys since 1990. His puzzles are in the spirit of Tetris and M. C. Escher - visually stimulating, thought provoking, broadly appealing, and highly original. He has created hundreds of puzzles for magazines and thousands for computer games. He is especially interested in designing daily, weekly, and monthly puzzles for the Web and for portable devices.

George Lechner is an adjunct professor at the University of Hartford, where he teaches courses on Italian art and culture. He earned his master's degree in art history at Bryn Mawr, specializing in religious symbolism. As a Whiting fellow in Rome, he spent two years researching Andrea Sacchi, a baroque painter and contemporary of Bernini, who was commissioned by Pope Urban VIII to create an astrology-themed fresco for his palace ceiling. Lechner discovered that the mystical images in the fresco were designed to induce good fortune and protect the pope and the Catholic Church against the challenges posed by the Protestant Reformation. His thesis on the subject was published in Art Bulletin.

Tod Marder is Professor II (distinguished professor) and Program Director for Historic Preservation, Renaissance and Baroque Architecture at Rutgers University, as well as a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome. He studied art history at UC Santa Barbara and received MA and PhD degrees from Columbia University in New York, studying with Howard Hibbard and Rudolf Wittkower. He has published two books on Bernini's work: Bernini's Scala Regia in the Vatican Palace, Architecture, Sculpture, and Ritual and Bernini and the Art of Architecture. The latter book won the Borghese Prize for the best book on a Roman topic by a foreigner in 1998. Dr. Marder is currently writing a book about new developments in Bernini studies.

Richard P. McBrien is Crowley-O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame, having formerly served three terms as chair of the Department of Theology. He is also past president of the Catholic Theological Society of America. The author of more than twenty books, including Catholicism, Lives of the Popes, and Lives of the Saints, he appears regularly on network television as a commentator on Catholic events, and was an ABC News on-air commentator for the last papal election. Father O'Brien was also a contributor to the previous book in this series, Secrets of the Code. His latest book, The Church: The Evolution of Catholicism, will be published by HarperOne in September, 2008.

Mark Midbon is a senior programmer and analyst at the University of Wisconsin. As a computer programmer during the early 1990s, Mark automated campus libraries at the University of Wisconsin. During this time he wrote articles for Computers and Society, a journal of the Association of Computing Machinery. His pieces focused on Israel's computer models for the 1967 War and the rise of the computer firm IBM. Later, he worked for the Y2K project at Arizona State University, when he became more interested in pure science. It was during this time that he wrote a number of Internet articles about the priest-geologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the priest-astronomer Georges Lemaitre.

Tom Mueller is a writer based in Italy. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, BusinessWeek, Best American Travel Writing, and other US and European publications. He is completing a novel about the building and rebuilding of St. Peter's Basilica, as well as what he calls a "user's guide" to underground Rome - the vast realm of temples, palaces, brothels, and humble homes that lie buried beneath the modern city.

John W. O'Malley, a Jesuit priest, is the Distinguished Professor of Church History at the Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has lectured widely in the United States, Europe, and Southeast Asia. Among his prize-winning books are The First Jesuit and Trent and All That, both from Harvard University Press. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is also past president of the American Catholic Historical Association and the Renaissance Society of America. His most recent book is Four Cultures of the West.

Geoffrey K. Pullum is a linguist specializing in English grammar. Currently a Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, Pullum has also served as a Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a Constance E. Smith Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. He contributes frequently to the popular Language Log site www.languagelog.com, where, if you dig through the archives, you can find a hysterically funny piece called "The Dan Brown Code" about Brown's use of language in The Da Vinci Code. He has also authored or coauthored more than two hundred articles and a dozen books. The funniest of his books is The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax, and the most serious is a large-scale English reference grammar, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, which in 2004 won the Leonard Bloomfield Book Award.

Alexandra Robbins is a New York Times bestselling author and lecturer whose books include Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities, Secrets of the Tomb: Skull and Bones, the Ivy League, and the Hidden Paths of Power, Conquering Your Quarterlife Crisis: Advice from Twentysomethings Who Have Been There and Survived, and most recently, The Overachievers: The Secret Life of Driven Kids. She has written for Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and the Washington Post, among other publications. She regularly appears in the national media and lectures frequently to groups about secret societies, twentysomething issues, Greek life, and writing. She can be contacted at www.alexandrarobbins.com.

Wade Rowland is the author of Galileo's Mistake: A New Look at the Epic Confrontation Between Galileo and the Church, and more than a dozen other books. He is an award-winning journalist and television producer of news and documentary programs. A former Maclean-Hunter Chair of Ethics in Communications at Ryerson University in Toronto, Rowland currently teaches the history, sociology and philosophy of communications technologies at the Atkinson School of Arts and Letters, York University. His most recent book, about corporations and the eclipse of morals, is entitled Greed Inc.: Why Corporations Rule Our World and Why We Let it Happen. Dr. Rowland can be reached via www.waderowland.com.

Susan Sanders is the cofounder and executive director of the Institute of Design and Culture in Rome. She received her MA in architecture from Georgia Tech and her BA in art from the University of Georgia. Over the past decade Susan has taught architectural design for the Universities of Arkansas and Kansas, and the Savannah College of Art and Design, in addition to holding the Hyde Chair of Excellence for the University of Nebraska. She was also creative director for Carrier Johnson Architects in San Diego, California. She currently resides in Rome.

David A. Shugarts is a journalist with more than thirty years' experience, having served on newspapers and magazines as a reporter, photographer, desk editor, and editor-in-chief. He was reared in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, and obtained a BA in English from Lehigh University, followed by service in Africa in the Peace Corps, then received an MS in journalism from Boston University. His fields of expertise include aviation and marine writing. He was the recipient of five regional and national awards from the Aviation/Space Writers Association. Shugarts was the founding editor of Aviation Safety Magazine in 1981 and of Powerboat Reports magazine in 1988. As a writer, he has contributed to a dozen books, including Secrets of the Code and Secrets of Angels & Demons. His latest book is Secrets of the Widow's Son: The Mysteries Surrounding the Sequel to The Da Vinci Code.

Annalyn Swan, a partner with Peter Bernstein in ASAP Media, was a contributing editor for this book. Founded in 2003, ASAP Media is a media development firm whose clients include Reader's Digest Association, US News & World Report, and the Boston Globe, as well as other companies and nonprofit organizations. Swan has been a staff writer at Time magazine, music critic and arts editor of Newsweek, and editor-in-chief of Savvy. With the art critic Mark Stevens, she has also written de Kooning: An American Master.

Greg Tobin is an author, editor and journalist who has written extensively about popes and the papacy. He is currently the senior adviser for communications at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey. He won the Pope John Paul II Medal for academic excellence in 2006 and was twice a finalist for the Catholic Press Association Book Award. In addition to two previous novels about the papacy, Conclave and Council, he is the author of Her Holiness, a forthcoming novel about a near-future female pope. His handbook about the history and future of the papal elections, Selecting the Pope: Uncovering the Mysteries of Papal Elections, has been revised, updated and reissued in paperback.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist, was born and raised in New York City, where he attended the Bronx High School of Science. Tyson went on to earn his BA from Harvard and his PhD from Columbia. His professional research interests include star formation, exploding stars, dwarf galaxies, and the structure of the Milky Way. He has served on two presidential commissions on America's future in space. Dr. Tyson is a monthly essayist for Natural History magazine. Among the books he has written are his memoir The Sky Is Not the Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist, Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution, and the bestselling Death by Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandries. He is the director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium and served as host for NOVA's Origins miniseries and NOVA ScienceNow program.

James Wasserman is a lifelong student of esotericism. His writings include Secret Societies: Illuminati, Freemasons, and the French Revolution, Art and Symbols of the Occult, and Aleister Crowley and the Practice of the Magical Diary. His Chronicle Books edition of The Egyptian Book of the Dead, edited by Dr. Ogden Goelet, features a full-color papyrus with an integrated English translation. His The Templars and the Assassins has thus far been published in five languages. His controversial The Slaves Shall Serve defines political liberty as a spiritual value and analyzes modern trends toward collectivism.

Cyril H. Wecht has been a certified by the American Board of Pathology in anatomic, clinical, and forensic pathology. Prior to his retirement in 2008, he served as the elected coroner of Allegheny County in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and is chairman of the Advisory Board of the Cyril H. Wecht Institute of Forensic Science and Law at Duquesne University School of Law. He has personally performed approximately 15,000 autopsies and has supervised, reviewed, or been consulted on approximately 35,000 additional postmortem examinations. Dr. Wecht is author of more than 500 professional publications and editor of thirty-five books. He frequently provides expert testimony in court cases. He also appears regularly on national TV and radio shows and has written several books about cases in the news, including Cause of Death, Grave Secrets, and Who Killed Jon Benet Ramsey?

Mark S. Weil, PhD, a leading expert on the art of sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini and baroque imagery, is the E. Desmond Lee Professor Emeritus in the department of Art History at the University of Washington. He wrote his dissertation on Bernini's decoration of the Ponte Sant'Angelo (the Bridge of Angels that Robert Langdon crosses in search of the Illuminati lair), which led to his book The History and Decoration of the Ponte S. Angelo. For the past thirty years Weil has gone to Rome each year to conduct research at the Vatican Library and Archives. Weil is also the former director of the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University as well as the University's Sam Fox Arts Center.

Robert Anton Wilson was an acclaimed author of more than thirty books. He was associate editor at Playboy in the late 1960s and is a futurist, playwright, poet, lecturer, and stand-up comic. With Robert Shea, Wilson coauthored the Illuminatus! Trilogy, which the Village Voice called "the biggest sci-fi cult novel . . . since Dune." The trilogy has been reprinted in many languages and adapted into a ten-hour epic theater piece. In 1986, only ten years after its publication, Illuminatus! won the Prometheus Award as a classic of science fiction. Wilson stars in Maybe Logic: The Lives and Ideas of Robert Anton Wilson, a film by Lance Bauscher, which won the Best Documentary award at the San Francisco Film Festival in 2004. Wilson teaches online courses at the Maybe Logic Academy.

Josh Wolfe is a managing partner of Lux Capital, where he focuses on investments in nanotechnology. He previously worked at Salomon Smith Barney and Merrill Lynch and now sits on Merrill's TechBrains advisory board. He conducted cutting-edge AIDS research and published in Nature, Cell Vision, and the Journal of Leukocyte Biology. Josh is the author of the five-hundred-page "The Nanotech Report." He is also editor of the Forbes/Wolfe Nanotech Report, and writes a column at Forbes magazine. As a founder of the NanoBusiness Alliance, Josh joined President Bush in the Oval Office for the signing of the 21st Century Nanotech Research and Development Act. Red Herring has called him "Mr. Nano." Steve Forbes has called him "America's Leading Authority of Nanotechnology." He has appeared in BusinessWeek, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and is a regular guest of CNBC. Josh graduated with distinction from Cornell University.