The Big U by Neal Stephenson (Epub)

Description

The New York Times Book Review called Neal Stephenson’s most recent novel “electrifying” and “hilarious”. but if you want to know Stephenson was doing twenty years before he wrote the epic Cryptonomicon, it’s back-to-school time. Back to The Big U, that is, a hilarious send-up of American college life starring after years our of print, The Big U is required reading for anyone interested in the early work of this singular writer.

User’s Reviews

Review “Satire is Stephenson’s major.”–“Los Angeles Times Book Review”A satiric, apocalyptic look at life . . . one is reminded of “Catch 22 . . . the author has beguiled us with a series of inventive episodes and stories, told in a witty, unusually clear and continuously fresh style. This is a most impressive debut.”–“Publisher’s Weekly”An entertaining and sometimes murderous satire on campus life.”–“New York Times Book Review –This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Reviews from Amazon users, collected at the time the book is getting published on UniedVRG. It can be related to shiping or paper quality instead of the book content:

⭐ The book self-described itself as a merging of Animal House and 1984. A university descends into waring factions on political and physically while a religious worshipping of a window fan evolves. Tongue in cheek the author warns that you might think it won’t happen to you,but the Big U was just ahead of its time.

⭐ I’m a big Neal Stephenson fan and thought I should read some.of the earlier books to be complete. Zodiac was really fun, but this one, while it showed some sparks, was quite a mess. The very long last chapter was quite a drag, and while I guess there was a resolution, the explanations were fairly trite. Yes, university life is silly, but for stuff razzing academia, there were much better bits in Cryptonomicon, Baroque, Anathem and even briefly in D.O.D.O.

⭐ I guess this is what you get when you let a brilliant but immature writer try to cover Catch-22 in a university setting. The first half of The Big U is a fun but overbroad campus satire; then Stephenson gets tired of that and shifts the story into a full-out action-adventure in which the groups he set up earlier as amusing satires of real university phenomena become warring factions when law and order breaks down. Although this part is a disappointment from a satirical perspective, it is more inventively written than the first half — Stephenson’s version of such chaos is complex and realistic in the way everyone’s schemes are immediately trampled by everyone else’s. Stephenson recycled and improved this “every man for himself” chaos in the riot scene in The Diamond Age years later. We also see Stephenson’s early interest in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which he later raised to wild heights in Snow Crash.You can see the training wheels — this is by no means a great novel (as Snow Crash is) — but The Big U will have historical interest for Stephenson fans, and it is a frothy, fun diversion in its own right.

⭐ Neal Stephenson is always great fun, and the Big U is far from an exception. An exciting story that snowballs from minor collegiate drama to life-and-death struggles in an engaging way.

⭐ What’s really fascinating about The Big U is how early Neal Stephenson hit upon so many of the themes that he follows through so much of his more recent fiction. Others have commented about the interest in computers, programming, and worms–these come in as plot points here, but Stephenson hadn’t figured out how to use them in detail without losing the reader, as he did later in Cryptonomicon. The fascinating blend between absolutely ludicrous plot twists, believable detail, and weird, geeky heros is here already. And I noticed some more incidental ideas germinating here; I was struck by how the decaying University, once the epitome of higher education, resembled the decaying palace of Louis XIV, complete with bats and rats and crumbling ceilings and walls. Also, the dumping of cement into the hole occupied by the “B-men” in the Big U was surely a forerunner of two scenes in Cryptonomicon–if you haven’t read it, I don’t want to spoil it for you here. We are missing a red-headed immortal, but Stephenson was just getting warmed up. Fans should not miss this; but if you haven’t gotten bitten by the Stephenson bug, you might want to start elsewhere.

⭐ The title should have been Dante’s U, as the world Stephenson describes seems to fall deeper into the hell we knew as college. Quite frankly, the only reason this book is of interest is because of Stephenson’s later works. I don’t know how anyone can take this book seriously or say it has much to do with college in the eigthies. There is so much material from the eighties college experience and this book barely scratches the surface. It starts as a slightly over the top skewering life on the big campus, but to stick to the book’s themes, the story turns into one huge (and not so funny) acid trip. The second half of the book is so over the top, nuclear waste, giant rats, and submachine gun toting heroes that it lost all sense of ‘fun’ or satire. One can see a little genesis of his later writings, especially ‘Zodiac’, but anyone who is not a fan of Stephenson’s is going to be rolling their eyeballs and wondering how he made the huge leap from this to outstanding ‘Snow Crash’.

⭐ Amazingly prescient

⭐ Neal Stephenson’s ethnological imagination makes hash of the usual campus clans, clones and clowns in The Big U. A month by month deconstruction of the not-so-typical academic year in a very typical Midwestern University, The Big U is probably most interesting to three different groups: Neal Stephenson’s readers, readers of academic satire, and anyone traumatized by a college experience in the ’80’s.Stephenson readers may be most disappointed in the tenor of the book. Although it doesn’t live up to the standards of his later novels, however, The Big U is a microscopic look at the germs of ideas that Stephenson more fully developed in Snow Crash. Most notable of these: the Worm, a powerful computer virus that only one Ubergeek can successfully battle. But the very elements most interesting to Stephenson fans may baffle fans of academic satire, who would probably prefer a straightforward romp, such as Jane Smiley’s Moo U.This novel cannot be evaluated outside of the context of the 1980’s, when the words “date rape” were just beginning to be uttered. In colleges across the midwest, the world was divided between the Reaganites and those who lived in constant awareness that Missouri housed at least 165 nuclear missiles. Something called AIDS hit the news, and there were some projections that huge numbers of the general population would be dead in 10 years. Anybody who knew what a mouse was was automatically a geek and proud to be one. The Big U is probably most valuable for its sociological grasp of all the factions and campus groups coming to a head in that time.Because I am a Neal Stephenson reader, a fan of academic satire and a survivor of the 80’s, I found The Big U a wonderful read, and couldn’t put it down. I liked the characters all the way through, stayed interested in the plot, and couldn’t wait to find out what happened. I wasn’t disappointed, but did find some of the scenes a bit violent. Thus, the four-star rating.

⭐ It was difficult to believe that this was written by the same genius who wrote…well, every other book Neal Stephenson has written. Granted, it was his first book and I believe it was written in college, hence the theme of it, but it just doesn’t read like his other books, even his other early books.

⭐ I enjoy everything by Neal Stephenson.

Keywords

Free Download The Big U in Epub format
The Big U Epub Free Download
Download The Big U 2009 Epub Free
The Big U 2009 Epub Free Download
Download The Big U Epub
Free Download Ebook The Big U