Customer Reviews

Cryptonomicon.

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is a book of ideas disguised as a superb picaresque adventure novel -- incidentally interwoven with the loosely connected sagas of three families. Hilariously funny, outrageous, erudite, profane, and very, very, very smart. Consider:

* Corporal Bobby Shaftoe, the WW2 Marine who writes haikus and practices the "chop-socky" he learned from a Japanese soldier -- when he's not screwing women, shooting morphine, killing "Nips", or engaged in an incomprehensible effort to protect the greatest Allied military secret of the War.

* Goto Dengo, the mining engineer turned Nipponese soldier who learns to pitch baseballs from Bobby Shaftoe in exchange for teaching judo and haiku to Bobby in Shanghai, before the war. Dengo's war is complicated by jungle, atrocity, malnutrition, disease, incompetence in the Japanese Army High Command, and a crisis of conscience, culminating in a commission to build an impregnable and unfindable treasure chamber for "strategic war materials" in the wilds of the Phillipine bundoks -- on completion of which, he is ordered to kill himself and his crew.

* Lawrence Waterhouse, the musically gifted mathematician friend of Alan Turing, who flunked out of college because he was too bright -- then goes on to work on the Purple (here called "Indigo") and Enigma decryption projects and to provide mathematically motivated direction for the counterintelligence activities that protect those projects from the Axis.

* Randy Waterhouse, grandson of Lawrence, computer nerd and networking guru, who, with his old gaming buddy Avi (great-great-something-grandson of Moshe de la Cruz in Stevenson's Baroque Cycle books), starts a high-tech networking company to build a cryptographically secure, private, government-resistant, Internet data haven with a reliable and untraceable currency to support it, all aimed at (among other things) preventing future Holocausts -- and backed by a hoard of Axis war gold.

* America (Amy) Shaftoe, daughter of Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe and granddaughter of Bobby Shaftoe -- the multilingual treasure diver who captures Randy's heart.

* Enoch Root, the German/Australian Catholic missionary who begins WW2 as a covert radio listener and ends as chaplain to Bobby Shaftoe's peculiar Division 2702 on missions to "widen the bell curve" and add wierdness to the war. Strangely unaged a half-century later, Enoch introduces Randy Waterhouse to a cryptosystem called Pontifex -- and the information needed to crack the once "uncrackable" Arethusa code, which Randy discovered in a trunk in his grandfather's attic.

Plus a cast of thousands, each with their own intricate web of adventures, and each with a life that expresses a human point of view towards the realities of cryptography, computing, networking, information, money, freedom, responsibility, duty, human nature, and the Internet.

The best book I've ever read, bar none. I've read all 900-plus pages at least ten times, and it gets better each time.

You will marvel that a single man possesses the imagination, intelligence and humor to write this engrosing multi-generational tale of war and technophilia. You will surely find yourself reading excerpts aloud to anyone who'll listen (and they will love to listen!) Unforgettable characters, with all their faults and wonders, will embed themselves in your mind forever. Stephenson has carved himself a notch in literary history with this one.

Having enjoyed Snowcrash and being a bit of a crypto fan, I was predisposed to like Cryptonomicon and like it I did. This novel combines edge-of-your-seat war action, treasure hunting and modern geekery into one highly entertaining package. This book takes you from the battlefield at Guadalcanal to Silicon Valley and, while I can't say from experience that Stephanson has everything right about the war scenes (though I found them quite exciting), he certainly nails the start-up culture of the 90's in the Bay Area.

I did find the book to drag a bit for me about two thirds through, but the rough spots were minimal and kept the story moving forward. I also found that I did not much care for the protagonist, but that's fine--why should I?

On the whole, I'd recommend this book to fellow geeks and fans of the shadowy world of cryptography. I would also recommend, as a follow-up reading or as a preface, Steven Levy's excellent non-fiction work, "Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government Saving Privacy in the Digital Age." Levy's book provides an excellent foundation for understading the personalities and politics of Cryptonomicon, both in therms of the early history of cryptography and the attitudes that some geeks have toward government crypto today.

This is a story of World War II and a story of computer geeks stumbling onto history.
Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse is the main character. He has what may be Asperbgers syndrome. In college he meets Alan Turing and a German, they are all math wizs. The story in the book bounces around with several characters being important. It gets to the point you can see all the story lines will meet. It makes a really good story.
The computer geeks are starting a company to do something and stumble onto scavenger treasure. The Japanese build a mountain of gold and bury it. This does get to be a bit of a complex story, and knowing that all the storylines come together, you read on to see where and how. It is most interesting that the author does introduce masterbation and sexual relief. You know that this stuff does happen, but authors do not generally bother to mention it.

Yes, I read all 910 pages of this monster. No i did not understand a lot of it. Is Neal Stephenson from another planet? There must be some pretty smart folks on this earth. Maybe I missed something? I guess I'll read it again, naw i think I'll stick to Harry Potter! My brain hurts after reading this thing. And I thought The Satanic Verses was complex!

What a sprawling book. Big enough to serve as a decent door stop in a minor gale. Characters and events galore. All tied together by the invention of the digital computer in WW2 for the Brits (using mercury) and the Americans (using vacuum tubes) and cryptology and cryptanalysis, then and today, more or less, for the creation of an Internet data haven in a fictitious monarchy in the vicinity of Malaysia. Along the way, there are submarines, gold bullion, Guadalcanal, Douglas MacArthur, lawsuits, computer hacking, and the harrowing creation of (and escape from) a granite crypt for the storage of stolen German and Nipponese gold. That ought to be enough to interest anyone. Although the author is generally considered a science fiction writer, there seems to be little enough of scifi in this tale. But it suffers not a bit for the lack thereof.

This book is sublime. It is fiction in the sense that none of the events depicted actually happened, but it is true in a deeper sense in that something like it almost assuredly did. BUT THIS IS IN GERMAN!!! The irony of reading Cryptonomicon in German is not lost on me, but I would like that to have been clearer. I know it is in the "Language" section of the description, but I think something as important as that could have a more descriptive listing. Why would the German language be the first one to come up anyway? Frustrating.