Cryptonomicon. (Paperback)

by Neal Stephenson (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 1184 pages
• Publisher: Goldmann (May 1, 2003)
• Language: German
• ISBN-10: 344254193X
• ISBN-13: 978-3442541935
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.5 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #549,012 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Cryptography Meets War Gold, the Holocaust, the Alchemical Priest Who Would Not Die, and the US Marines, June 2, 2006

By	etymologik (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cryptonomicon. (Hardcover)

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.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A brilliant mind with an outrageous sense of humor., December 23, 2004

By	Humble Opinion (Orinda, CA USA) - See all my reviews

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.

5.0 out of 5 stars Most readable doorstop ever, May 15, 2009

By	Dick Stanley (Austin, TX) - See all my reviews

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.