Report an issue with this product or seller
I LOVED this book. But, for potential readers, I have a VERY large caveat: Unless you have a love of mathematics and/or cryptanalysis you're going to miss out on much that made the book, for me, so great. In fact, judging from the one and two star reviews so prevalent here, you more than likely are going to hate it and end up torching it in your back yard in frustration and dancing around the ashes. By way of anecdote, I was talking to one of my neighbours who happens to have a degree in mechanical engineering while we were out walking our dogs about a certain aspect of the book that had me puzzled for a bit, and another neighbour stopped to join us. After listening for a time, she looked at me and asked, in a semi-sarcastic, baffled tone, "Are you reading an Engineering textbook for fun?" When I told her it was a novel, she became even more nonplussed. So, the point here is, you've been warned. I happen to be an English Literature major, but I was one of those kids in school who in, say, trigonometry class just looked at a math problem, knew the answer and handed in my tests in five minutes. The words, "SHOW WORK" are scorched into my memory of adolescence. On the other hand, if you've liked Stephenson's other works, or like picaresque literary jaunts in general, you will no doubt like this one as well. You'll just have to skip the parts I found most fascinating.
I can now say, though, that I understand why Stephenson fans took him to task for lack of verisimilitude in Snow Crash and the books which constitute The Baroque Cycle, both of which are a great deal of fun to read, but not terribly conducive to deep thinking. This book is so conducive, for a number of reasons, but the primary one, I should say, is that very few people realise just how WEIRD the branch of mathematics known as Statistics is. The simplest example I can think of is coin tossing: If you enter a (rather primitive) casino, toss a coin once and come up heads, your chance on the second toss of coming up heads again is 25%. It's not 50%. Furthermore, if you toss the coin and it comes up heads, then put the coin in your pocket and wait three days, three months, three years, however long, and take that same coin out of your pocket on the other side of the globe and flip it, your chances of coming up heads, after all this time, are still 25%, not 50%. I've gone out about the Math enough for this review, but the Math herein is very much concerned with probabilities like this one. It makes you start thinking, as the character Waterhouse does at one point, of the entire world as a giant probability wave. I can't tell you how many hours of sleep I lost tossing and turning with different numbers running through my head.
The characters in this book, as Stephenson puts it are "people too busy leading their lives to worry about extending their life expectancy." This makes for very intriguing, if involved, reading. But the writing can also approach the poetic at times. The sinking of the Arizona at Pearl Harbor is described thusly: "A military lyre of burnished steel that sings a thousand men to their resting places at the bottom of the harbor."
And the book is so terribly funny. The Englishman, Chatan's, description to Detachment 2702 of the importance of knowing the right way to, er, blow your head off if in danger of being caught by the enemy is priceless, "You would be astonished at how many otherwise competent chaps botch this apparently simple procedure."
Also, as noted by other reviewers, there are numerous in-jokes, my personal favourite being the Latin motto for the Societas Eruditorum: "Ignoti et quasi occulti." Which Enoch Root translates for Bob Shaftoe as, "Hidden and unknown-more or less," which is EXACTLY what it means! Notice the quotation marks surrounding more or less. The word "quasi," in Latin means "more or less" or "as it were" or "so to speak".
Alright, I've gone on long enough, perhaps too long, for an Amazon review. For those few who might be interested, I'll try to include a simple program I came up with for solving the Turing bicycle problem, which Stephen uses to illustrate how the Enigma machine works in the Comment section once this review is posted.
A wonderful book!
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Follow the author
Get new release updates & improved recommendations
Something went wrong. Please try your request again later.
Discover the latest buzz-worthy books, from mysteries and romance to humor and nonfiction. Explore more
More items to explore
Page 1 of 1 Start over
From the Publisher
Polostan
|
Termination Shock
|
Seveneves
|
Reamde
|
Anathem
|
Cryptonomicon
|
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Customer Reviews |
2,768
|
8,828
|
31,517
|
5,652
|
5,187
|
8,409
|
| Price | EUR 16.07 | EUR 13.67 | EUR 9.74 | EUR 17.37 | EUR 6.92 | EUR 11.32 |
About the author
Fiction that is Truer than a Documentary
If you want to see how the world really works, how things fit together in a way no documentary could describe, read this book. It is not pulp candy or light reading, but effort you expend to create the complex relationships of the book in your mind is necessary for its payoff, and the payoff is worth it, a hundredfold. Amazing. An epic. I finished yesterday, and I am still not unwound from its climax. This may be the first book since Heinlein's 'Stranger' I read multiple times.
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews. Please reload the page.
Top reviews from other countries
- Amazon CustomerReviewed in the United Kingdom on August 24, 2012
Mind boggling, brilliant
-
VOLKER KERKHOFFReviewed in Spain on June 6, 2016
La novela más "friki"
Format: KindleVerified Purchase - johnson blasselReviewed in France on December 26, 2025
Great read
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
