Rating: 
Summary: Best book I've read all year
Review: Easily characters to identify with. Great dual-timeline plot that ties both today's business and technology with the science/math advances of WWII.
Rating:
Summary: Superb
Review: Great book from a great writer! As riveting as 'The Devil's Teardrop' or "The Triumph and the Glory" and a style perfect for the genre, this one is a must-read for fans of great writing and exceptional plotting.
Rating:
Summary: Reminds me of a Catch 22 for today
Review: A long book that took me even longer to read. Normally, a fast reader, I slowed down for fear of missing the subtleties of his language. I took frequent breaks just to reflect on the delights of the selection. For me it wasn't the plot or characterizations that make it memorable, but the little tongue-in-cheek satirical asides dealing with WWII, high tech start-ups, Silicon Valley, Seattle, and the developing 3rd world.
Rating: 
Summary: Great stuff, not Stephenson's best
Review: I'd probably give it 5 stars if anyone but Stephenson had written it, but Snow Crash and The Diamond Age have raised my expectations for Stephenson to a near-impossible level. With notable exceptions (mostly Amy--why in the heck is she attracted to Randy in the first place? ), most of the characters were great. You would expect that that a 1,000 page book would be able to tie everything up, but the last hundred or so pages were really lacking in resolution detail and Stephenson-esque verve. A lot of great stuff, but it was all in all a touch tedious. I'd probably recommend it to a friend, but only if he or she had a lot of time on their hands.
Rating: 
Summary: stephenson writes a great future-is-now thriller
Review: the intense explanations make you have to re-read a lot if you're not a tech-head. the crypto stuff is fascinating, however, and the walk-throughs are good enough that you can teach yourself some of them.characters are likable but human... would have liked more on Avi and America, though. more background, character building. only real complaint: after more than 900 pages, it just stops. it was a good ending, but it very much leaves the reader hanging... what next?
Rating:
Summary: Greatness
Review: This book is so excellent I cannot put it into words. I like it perhaps better than Snow Crash. I like the fact that it is supposedly a Science Fiction novel, but none of the science was fiction. Ever piece of technology in the book exists. I found it so impressive the depth this brought to the book, technology presented as futuristic and amazing really puts into perspective the world we live in today.
Rating:
Summary: This book is a very good book, Very well written.
Review: This story was page turning, I couldn't put it down. The way he tells one story through a totaly different story, is very cool. Bobby Shaftoe is the hardcore Marine,Lawerance Waterhouse was the nerd, and Randy Waterhouse was the hacker/average joe.
Rating:
Summary: What a Marvelous read!
Review: 212 other reviewers have weighed in here, so other than echoing them in what a great book this is to read, let me leave you with another good link: David Payne's Confessions of a Taoist on Wall Street. It's a little shorter, but no less involved. Check it out on Amazon. I think readers of this book will also enjoy the other.
Rating:
Summary: It's not "War and Peace," but it's still a great read.
Review: I very much enjoyed reading Neal Stephenson's epic-like novel centered on cryptography. The story was ingeniously woven, threading together scenes from past and present. Even though it didn't have the great pay-off at the end that I was expecting, the journey itself, as the cliché goes, was worth it for its own sake. I was often amazed at the breadth of knowledge displayed by Stephenson, but then I sometimes felt that the story would have been a lot tighter without so many of his erudite asides. I was at first puzzled, and then amused by his apparently deliberate and jarring use of anachronisms in the World War II sections, i.e., the use of figures that reference things like interstellar travel. The most egregious fault of the book is the extremely poor drawing of the female characters, not that there are many; they come off as essentially male fantasies of what women are like (sexy), what they like (Marines and computer nerds), and what they do (have sex, spy, and scuba dive). I, too, was annoyed with the typos that appear with ever greater frequency in the latter half of the book--perhaps all together these form some sort of code? What makes the 900+page novel so worthwhile are the richly complex and highly imaginative story with its small bows to real history, and the well measured doses of fun and fairly accessible cryptography-oriented math.
Rating:
Summary: CPU Sci-Fi *plus* accurate, wry obs. of humans/society!
Review: The only things I *didn't* like were the odd (and fortunately rare) editing errors -- first, and worst, in the early encrypted msg (attack Prl. H lacks some letters!), then in an equation written in the form "y<=" instead of using a proper "less than or equal" symbol. There are also a few other cases in which, obviously, spell checkers caught an error, but the replacement letter was incorrect. In addition, Mr. Stephenson or his less-than-perfect copy editor sometimes throws in an extra comma (between subject and verb clauses) which is annoying in such a long book. I read it in two days (and nights), which is why I hated rewinding to the beginning of a sentence at 2am just to reconstrue it.... My favorite scene comes early in the book when the 'dwarf in the world of hobbits' decides to speak up; I read it last night to a friend -- a technically illiterate, rather older librarian who never reads fiction -- and she enjoyed it, too. I hope this author begins to get the cross-over audience his material deserves!
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