"The love child of Wikipedia and crass commercialism"

Ha ha. MercatorNet's Michael Cook reviews Dan Brown's Inferno, in which one of the main themes (and dire warnings) for the 21st century world is the imminent danger of --wait for it-- OVERPOPULATION! As Mr. Cook asks, "Has Dan Brown been living in a bunker for the last ten years?"

If so, he didn't have a thesaurus or a dictionay with him. Mr. Cook wonders:

[H]ow did the word “enormity” slip through, as in “the staggering force of [the cathedral’s] enormity” and “the David’s [Michelangelo’s statue] sheer enormity”? Enormity means, according my Oxford dictionary, “monstrous wickedness” or “dreadful crime”, or “serious error”. We can speak, for example, about the enormity of Dan Brown’s English, but not about the enormity of a cathedral.

Never mind Inferno's plot twists and villains:

[A]s I descended deeper and deeper into Inferno, I began to regard the real villain as Dan Brown’s editor, whom, out of what little compassion I can scrape together, I shall not name. His only credible excuse is that Dan Brown is one of those nightmare celebrity authors whom editors tremble to correct. 

To sum up:

Brown will never be described as a literary giant, but there is one technique in which he has no peer: product placement.

High praise indeed. Inferno, for sale, by the case lot, at a Costco near you. 

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