Cryptonomicon

Author - Neal Stephenson ... [Goo?] [Posters]

This Mass Market Paperback Book item from Avon was reviewed on 9-Dec-2008.

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1) Mass Market Paperback Book Cryptonomicon by Avon. I am 54 years old and I am a nerd. (Sounds like an AA confession or something).

You may think Important People like George Bush or Bill Clinton or President-elect (at time of writing) Obama, or A. Lincoln, or Alexander or Ghengis Khan or Hitler or Nimitz or FDR or Churchill are the kind of guys who make the world go `round. Or try to stop it, as the case may be.

You´d be dead wrong.

An interesting thing happened in the 19th century called the Industrial Revolution. After 20,000-some-odd years of digging in the dirt the planet suddenly went high-tech. Or at least higher-tech. The IPs were shocked, SHOCKED, to find they couldn´t win a war (or do much else) without tech. And where did they get their tech?

From us autistic, socially-inept, outta-the-box-thinking, harmless-appearing nerds. Stephenson gets this right, oh-so-dead-on-right, in "Cryptonomicon".

I almost never buy hardbacks any more except in extraordinary circumstances. Fellow serious bookworms will know why immediately - space. If the total volume in one´s abode can be expressed as X, and the volume taken up in said abode by hardback books is .99999X, it becomes obvious that...well, you get the picture. (Omigawd, an equation - means 10% fewer people will read this review). Sooner or later paperbacks start looking like the way to go.

When I saw the big Avon hardback edition in 1999 and took a quick look, it seemed like a possibility. But what iced the deal was the inside jacket picture of a young (maybe 10 y.o.?) NTS curled up on the couch reading the Epstein´s "First Book of Codes and Ciphers", a book I still have on my own shelf. Now THIS was my kinda author!

Since then, I´ve read "Cryptonomicon" every few years and never failed to pull something new out of it. This time it was an even better appreciation of the very digressions many of the reviewers here have taken exception to. They are brilliant little jewels in their own right. To those who fizzed through the book the first time and missed them, or even skipped `em deliberately (arrrrgh!), I say, "Read it again and slow down. Smell the coffee!"

The pages leading up to and including Lawrence Waterhouse´s Big Insight at the organ keyboard are among the most hilarious I´ve ever read. Could only have come straight from a true nerd´s heart.

About the ending. Sometimes in real life, things don´t get tied up with a then-everyone-lives-happily-ever-after ribbon, or a can-you-top-this bow. Sometimes the villain wins or the hero loses, or they both win, or they both lose. The codebreaker heroes of WWII got medals and citations they couldn´t publicly acknowledge for over thirty years. Many of them worked their butts off on projects the results of which they didn´t even see until such information began trickling out in the early 1970s.

Many of these ops would have seemed totally absurd from the point of view of the heavily-compartmented participants. Stephenson´s genius is his presentation of clandestine activities from the POVs of Bobby Shaftoe, who knows nothing, and Waterhouse, who knows everything.

After the 900-page tour-de-force NTS rolls out, about the only other ending I can envision is what I call the "up-yers ending", something like this:

"The Earth encounters a random black hole and falls into it. All life is squished into oblivion (including the characters you´ve read about for the past week) and the world ceases to exist. Thank you for buying this book."

THAT would´ve ticked off the reviewers even more.

My background includes writing ICBM flight software and service as a U.S. Navy Intelligence officer. I´ve read 1000s of books of all types, had three of my own published. I´ve never given max stars to a book before in my life. This one gets max stars. Six out of five, in fact. Stephenson wrote a book about us and he got it right.

Nerds rule.
¤

2) Mass Market Paperback Book Cryptonomicon by Avon. I started reading this book thinking I had bitten off more than I could chew. By the time I finished on the 1153rd page, I wanted another 1153 pages. Between the development of exciting/intelligent/dynamic/fun characters, the storylines, the overall plot, the twists, the action, the humor, Cryptonomicon is one of my top 3 favorite novels. Though it seems long, it´s difficult book to put down once you get started.

Cryptonomicon has everything: WWII action from both sides, spying, code breaking, adventure, action, humor, treasure hunting, computer engineering, hacking, sex, intrigue, covert operations, espionage, and to top it all off a love story that spans two generations. When I pictured the characters in this novel, for some reason, I imagined the characters from Ocean´s 11 for some reason.

The dual storylines between WWII and current day took some getting used to, but when all said and done, was the best way to tell this story.

My only gripe is that it concluded too quickly; I could have used another 20 pages or an epilogue, but suffice to say, I love this book, have read it twice, and have reccommended it to all my friends.

Now I am reccommending it to you.¤

3) Mass Market Paperback Book Cryptonomicon by Avon. I don´t remember buying this book, but that is not uncommon for my large collection of books. Having read most of the books on my bookshelf, I decided to give this a shot, not knowing what to expect.

At first, the plot confused me. It likes to jump into flashbacks and to different times without telling you, and often is intentionally vague to force you to guess.

Then it gets really good. Between WW2 intrigue and modern day mundane chores (like 5 pages of the perfect bowl of Captain Crunch), this is literary exploration at its best. I have not laughed out loud so many times in one book since reading the entire Hitchhikers Guide series.

Brilliant.¤

4) Mass Market Paperback Book Cryptonomicon by Avon. AM I GOING TO READ A THOUSAND PAGES BY ANYONE BUT TOLSTOI? NO. BUT I AM WRONG. HAVE NOT EVEN FINISHED THIS AND CANNOT WAIT TO TELL YOU TO READ THIS BOOK IF YOU HAVE AN INTEREST IN THE NATURE OF HACKING AND COMPUTATION, IN WW2, IN EVIL, IN REAL SEXY FUN, IN THE WORLD AMERICA HAS CREATED, IN THE PHILIPPINES -- I HAVE NEVER READ ABOUT THE P. IN ANY OTHER NOVEL. SURE PARTS ARE BORING BUT DON´T SKIP. DO NOT MAKE BELIEVE YOU UNDERSTAND. REREAD AND YOU WILL LEARN SOMETHING. SOMETIMES ITS NOT A NOVEL BUT A LONG AND VERY INTERESTING REPORT. SOMETIMES ITS A TEN PAGE SHAGGY DOG STORY. IT IS SO MUCH BETTER THAN TV AND EVEN NETFLIX AND YOU KNOW WHAT -- ITS ABOUT THE WORLD WE ACTUALLY LIVE IN AND CANNOT LEARN ABOUT FROM JOURNALISM, YOUR PARENTS, MOST OF YOUR TEACHERS. THIS IS AN EXCELLENT BOOK WITHOUT EVER GOING OVER THE TOP -- EVEN WHEN HE IS METICULOUSLY DESCRIBING MASS MURDER. WHICH IS FAIRLY OFTEN. AND WHEN HE DESCRIBES THE INTERIOR OF WONDERFUL PEOPLE WHO WANT TO COMMIT MASS MURDER BUT ARE PREVENTED FROM DOING IT BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT EVIL -- HE IS EVEN BETTER. AND REMEMBER, WE LIVE IN A WORLD THAT WAS CREATED BY MASS MURDER AND ITS STILL ON THE WORLD´S AGENDA. IF N.S. IS A NERD, I HAVE A NEW FOUND RESPECT FOR THEM.¤

5) Mass Market Paperback Book Cryptonomicon by Avon. The story is amazing but I was disappointed with this edition´s format. Very small pages make a very thick book which was more difficult to read than another version I´ve seen (blue with silver cover).¤

6) Mass Market Paperback Book Cryptonomicon by Avon. With this extraordinary first volume in what promises to be an epoch-making masterpiece, Neal Stephenson hacks into the secret histories of nations and the private obsessions of men, decrypting with dazzling virtuosity the forces that shaped this century.

In 1942, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse - mathematical genius and young Captain in the U.S. Navy - is assigned to detachment 2702. It is an outfit so secret that only a handful of people know it exists, and some of those people have names like Churchill and Roosevelt. The mission of Watrehouse and Detatchment 2702-commanded by Marine Raider Bobby Shaftoe-is to keep the Nazis ignorant of the fact that Allied Intelligence has cracked the enemy´s fabled Enigma code. It is a game, a cryptographic chess match between Waterhouse and his German counterpart, translated into action by the gung-ho Shaftoe and his forces.

Fast-forward to the present, where Waterhouse´s crypto-hacker grandson, Randy, is attempting to create a "data haven" in Southeast Asia - a place where encrypted data can be stored and exchanged free of repression and scrutiny. As governments and multinationals attack the endeavor, Randy joins forces with Shaftoe´s tough-as-nails grandaughter, Amy, to secretly salvage a sunken Nazi sumarine that holds the key to keeping the dream of a data haven afloat. But soon their scheme brings to light a massive conspiracy with its roots in Detachment 2702 linked to an unbreakable Nazi code called Arethusa. And it will represent the path to unimaginable riches and a future of personal and digital liberty...or to universal totalitarianism reborn.

A breathtaking tour de force, and Neal Stephenson´s most accomplished and affecting work to date, CRYPTONOMICON is profound and prophetic, hypnotic and hyper-driven, as it leaps forward and back between World War II and the World Wide Web, hinting all the while at a dark day-after-tomorrow. It is a work of great art, thought, and creative daring; the product of a truly icon¤

7) Mass Market Paperback Book Cryptonomicon by Avon. Neal Stephenson enjoys cult status among science fiction fans and techie types thanks to Snow Crash, which so completely redefined conventional notions of the high-tech future that it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. But if his cyberpunk classic was big, Cryptonomicon is huge... gargantuan... massive, not just in size (a hefty 918 pages including appendices) but in scope and appeal. It´s the hip, readable heir to Gravity´s Rainbow and the Illuminatus trilogy. And it´s only the first of a proposed series--for more information, read our interview with Stephenson.

Cryptonomicon zooms all over the world, careening conspiratorially back and forth between two time periods--World War II and the present. Our 1940s heroes are the brilliant mathematician Lawrence Waterhouse, cryptanalyst extraordinaire, and gung ho, morphine-addicted marine Bobby Shaftoe. They´re part of Detachment 2702, an Allied group trying to break Axis communication codes while simultaneously preventing the enemy from figuring out that their codes have been broken. Their job boils down to layer upon layer of deception. Dr. Alan Turing is also a member of 2702, and he explains the unit´s strange workings to Waterhouse. "When we want to sink a convoy, we send out an observation plane first.... Of course, to observe is not its real duty--we already know exactly where the convoy is. Its real duty is to be observed.... Then, when we come round and sink them, the Germans will not find it suspicious."

All of this secrecy resonates in the present-day story line, in which the grandchildren of the WWII heroes--inimitable programming geek Randy Waterhouse and the lovely and powerful Amy Shaftoe--team up to help create an offshore data haven in Southeast Asia and maybe uncover some gold once destined for Nazi coffers. To top off the paranoiac tone of the book, the mysterious Enoch Root, key member of Detachment 2702 and the Societas Eruditorum, pops up with an unbreakable encryption scheme left over from WWII to befuddle the 1990s protagonists with conspiratorial ties.

Cryptonomicon is vintage Stephenson from start to finish: short on plot, but long on detail so precise it´s exhausting. Every page has a math problem, a quotable in-joke, an amazing idea, or a bit of sharp prose. Cryptonomicon is also packed with truly weird characters, funky tech, and crypto--all the crypto you´ll ever need, in fact, not to mention all the computer jargon of the moment. A word to the wise: if you read this book in one sitting, you may die of information overload (and starvation). --Therese Littleton¤

Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 6-Jan-2009, 00605128069780060512804, 060-830-960-580-660-5IB-DAB-8

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