Rating: 
Summary: A Fascinating Read!!
Review: This book will satisfy every type of reader,from the historical fiction fan to the science fiction fan to the corporate drone who likes to dream. It is a book that spans half a century, from Japan in WWII to to the Phillipines today. It is a romance, an epic, a war story,and a business story.
I have two critiques to make about it, however. It instoduces a fascinating female character who is plenty strong, then undermines her and makes her as weak as stereotypes would dictate.
The ending is open, and makes me wonder what either possibility means.
That's it. Otherwise, it is interesting, captivating, and worth buying.
Rating: 
Summary: Ugh. What a waste.
Review: Based on a lot of glowing reviews on Slashdot and the e-gold mailing list, I couldn't wait to get out and buy this in hardcover right after it first came out. Boy am I sorry. This book is way WAY too long. It's too long by half at least. I don't deny that Stephenson can write, but this book seems to have been written specifically for young computer nerds who will be amused by discussions of masturbation and cereal. You get the feeling that the book was written by a young boy going through the puberty. There is nothing wrong with this (Isaac Asimov wrote the Foundation trilogy when he was 16) but you don't expect to FEEL this in a book this long or covering the material he covers. I've been a computer nerd and an avid sci-fi reader for most of my life, and cryptography etc. fascinates me a great deal. This book COULD have been really good, but it needs a great deal of "tightening up". If Neal Stephenson had forced himself to cut the book in half I have a feeling it would have been a truly great book. But it goes on and on and on and on..... From one writer to another, I suggest he spend more time tightening up his book before he publishes, and for goodness sake, have an editor read it before it goes to print! I get the feeling the book was so long neither the author or the publisher wanted to take the time to fix the zillions of mistakes, some factual some grammatical, or to refine the text. Bottom line: Don't buy this book. Borrow it from a friend or check it out from the library. If you still love it, you can have mine!
Rating:
Summary: And I bought it in hardcover!..
Review: If I wanted to know about the consistency of some nerd's soggy Captain Crunch cereal, I could observe it any day almost anywhere at breakfast. The idiosyncracies and hangups of computer professionals do not interest me. That counts out half of this heafty book's plot. The rest is quite interesting: cryptography and warfare in WWII as experienced through 2 characters that have lives instead of funky technology. Is Stephenson telling us that modern man is a boring git? In this case, keep it short and sweet, baby. No rambling. And more girly action, PLEASE. Not all computer geeks wait a year to get layed.
Rating:
Summary: I wish this was the never ending story
Review: This is one of those books that end up being so good that you don't want it to end! I have a wonderful time reading it, both for the fast paced story and the high level of detail. It will never stop to amazed you!
Rating:
Summary: Enriching and enjoyable
Review: I didn't know too much about this book before diving in, outside of what I read on the back cover. The analogies to Pynchon were what sucked me into buying it, and there are certain similarities (funky character names, strange synergies, etc.) that Pynchon fans will see. It's a quick read, though, compared to Pynchon, and doesn't have the depth of Gravity's Rainbow (and that's not necessarily a criticism). The characters, for the most part, are very nicely developed (excluding, perhaps, a priest who ends up talking like a 15-year old American boy), the ending is very satisfying, and the multiple plot lines converge and overlap in constantly enjoyable ways. All in all, a great read.
Rating: 
Summary: Seriously abridged
Review: Buyer beware! The audio version of this book, formerly prominently advertised as UNABRIDGED, is nothing of the sort. It consists of what the box calls "Unabridged Excerpts" (an oxymoron if I ever heard one), pasted together by frequent summaries of intervening plot developments. If the experience of listening to the whole long, intricately developed novel is what you're looking for, the abridgement is not for you. Be sure you know what you're buying.
Rating:
Summary: Self-Indulgence defined
Review: This is what you'd mostly likely find while looking through the stuff those monkeys are churning out in hopes of getting to the Shakespeare.Simply awful.
Rating: 
Summary: A jumpy, yet brilliant tale
Review: Before I begin, I must divulge a key bit of information that may bias my review: It took me an entire year to read this epic. The novel, which spans 900+ pages, 50+ years and no less than 4 protagonists, is at times, a clumsy effort to convey various key facets of modern technology, and a disjointed effort to convey fictitious events in World War Two. At every other time, it is an absolutely brilliant work of art. The first 300 pages of the book lagged for me. It was hard to adjust to the constant shifting between protagonists, time periods, and ideas. Randy's story was uninteresting, murky, and just downright painful to read at times, in comparison the bright and exciting adventures of the characters in World War II. As a result of this story lag, I put the book down for 8 months, as I had just lost all interest in it. The book greatly picks up the pace a little over a third of the way through, and becomes incredibly hard to put down. The characters' stories interrelate constantly; creating situations that will leave the reader amazed at the correlation between each character and how closely their lives, and the lives of their closest acquaintances tie together. Stephenson does not so much illustrate some key plot points as much as he alludes to them; and this is my only major fault with the book. Some key moments are left to the imagination of the reader, which is forgivable, for each of the character's stories could be expanded into its own 900+ page novel. It's hard to get past the idea that Cryptonomicon is written for the techie crowd. But whether or not you fully understand the underlying scientific and technological aspects of the story is not important; Stephenson intends the reader to walk away with a clear picture of what the consequences of their usage is. Even disregarding the Math and Computer Science aspect, the story is full of humor and emotion that will leave a lasting impression on any reader. It's a shame about the length. At one point, I thought I would never finish it. Now I just wish there was more to read!
Rating:
Summary: book is great, tape is short
Review: Just a warning on this audio...this is one of my favorite Neal Stephenson books and Scott Brick is a wonderful reader...I didn't notice until the tape arrived that it said 'unabridged EXCERPTS' on the box. Can you say that? It's only 6 tapes long.
Rating: 
Summary: Confused moral message makes for disappointing book
Review: In CRYPTONOMICON, a massive (900 page) tome that interweaves plotlines of World War II codebreaking and modern-day data security, Neal Stephenson continues to explore how technology influences our lives and unlocks exotic futures. Stephenson's first novel concerning the advent of the digital era, 1991's SNOW CRASH, was a highly entertaining and satirical romp that I quite enjoyed. I found CRYPTONOMICON, however, disappointing. The basic gist of CRYPTONOMICON is that the actions of a handful of intelligence experts, led by USN Captain Lawrence Waterhouse, and a Marine, Bobby Shaftoe, to conceal from the Axis that they had broken ENIGMA affect the efforts of Waterhouse's grandson Randy, and several of his coworkers, to construct a "data haven" in SE Asia. This data haven would allow individuals to communicate in total privacy as well as pave the way to true electronic currency. Hidden Japanese and Nazi gold figures too, and Randy teams up with Shaftoe's granddaughter Amy in an adventure to increase shareholder value, avoid lawsuits, and save the world from future Holocausts. Does that sound complex? It is. CRYPTONOMICON is a large book, and although one may argue that 900 pages is a bit much, this book would have to be large no matter how tightly edited it was. Some of the book's bulk is due to cameos of key figures from the 1940's (Alan Turing gets mocked, Douglas MacArthur becomes a hilarious parody of himself), but I found these amusing. Nonetheless, CRYPTONOMICON is a bit foggy in its moral messages. Instead of using the word "Japan," Stephenson always uses "Nippon," thus instead of "Japanese" one finds "Nipponese." It seems to at least this reader that Stephenson is trying to avoid blaming Japan for its actions in World War II as to not offend a Japanese audience for his book. Nonetheless, there are parts in the book where Stephenson does speak of the horrors inflicted by the "Nipponese" army in Nanking and New Guinea, so perhaps he isn't an apologist for imperial Japan. One other hazy moral point is that Stephenson draws short of outright criticism of US intelligence activites, and its most infamous organization the National Security Agency. He merely dances around the point that although fifty years ago codebreakers saved the world from Hitler, nowadays they are more dedicated to economic espionage and violating the privacy of individuals than serving democracy. These two issues should have been presented more clearly, so that the reader can see who is good and who is bad in each plotline of the book and in real-life. Stephenson does however give a delightful view of the McCarthy-ish creation of the NSA in Comstock's diatribe against "communist homos," but it comes very late in the book and doesn't change the preceding 800 pages. For all its complex plot mechanics and geek subculture, CRYPTONOMICON is surprisingly lowbrow. There is an uncomfortable amount of profanity and pointless sex which is rather not like Stephenson. The book also lacks the wealth of gee-whiz ideas which characterize his earlier works. SNOW CRASH wasn't exactly great literature, but it did have a wide range of futuristic notions that are only now coming into being. Well, CRYPTONOMICON was certainly a let-down to me. For those unfamiliar with Neal Stephenson's writing, I would wholeheartedly recommend SNOW CRASH. For fans of Stephenson who wish to move on to CRYPTONOMICON, I would suggest waiting for its rumoured sequel to come out and seeing from its reviews whether the second volume makes the first worth reading.
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