THE BIG U PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Neal Stephenson | 320 pages | 14 Dec 2002 | HarperCollins Publishers Inc | 9780380816033 | English | New York, NY, United States BIG U | Rebuild By Design LMCR is being implemented in two separate parts. Related content. On April 17, Community members from Lower Manhattan come together to discuss de Blasio's flood protection proposal. The BIG Team. Find Us on Social Media. The events take place at a fictitious big university consisting of a single building a central complex with eight towers containing student housing , making the university an enclosed universe of its own. Stephenson uses this fact to take what starts as a mostly realistic satire and move it further and further into the realm of improbability, with giant radioactive rats, hordes of bats and a lab-made railgun. The book was written while Stephenson attended Boston University. The fictional campus' design is based on a BU dormitory, Warren Towers. Stephenson has said he is not proud of this book. When original editions began selling on eBay for hundreds of dollars, he relented and allowed The Big U to be republished, saying that the only thing worse than people reading the book was paying that much to read it. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Novel by Neal Stephenson. As his first work it is very reminiscent of Hunter S Thompson 's first book The Rum Diar This is the story of a very serious student trying to navigate the bureaucracy of the ridiculous hyperbole of higher education that is American Mega-university, a sort of parody of every large American university. As his first work it is very reminiscent of Hunter S Thompson 's first book The Rum Diary ; they are both rough and do not live up to the later works, but they both show the promise of the author. I read this book because I like Neal Stephenson. Apr 25, Mike rated it really liked it. Stephenson's very first book, from , which he has since disowned, is much better and more entertaining than he gives it credit for! A campus satire and a bit of a mess, it hasn't dated that much and is great fun to read. It's also amusing to see early examples of Stephenson's later themes. The nest of computer hackers prefigures Cryptonomicon, the university sealed off from the outside world prefigures Anathem, and the wild action sequences prefigure REAMDE. And at pages, it has the virt Stephenson's very first book, from , which he has since disowned, is much better and more entertaining than he gives it credit for! And at pages, it has the virtue of being quite short for a Stephenson book. Very glad I read it. View 2 comments. Aug 06, Robert rated it liked it Shelves: general-fiction. A compelling, largely accurate satire of modern higher education that gets progressively more surreal, crazed and violent as it goes along. This was Stephenson's first published novel and you can tell - every apparently pointless chunk of bizarre exposition is actually important, the book is no longer than it needs to be, characters aren't picked up and dropped like a toddler with a toy and the "Guns make the USA Great, everybody should have one, preferably several" bullshit is at least minimall A compelling, largely accurate satire of modern higher education that gets progressively more surreal, crazed and violent as it goes along. This was Stephenson's first published novel and you can tell - every apparently pointless chunk of bizarre exposition is actually important, the book is no longer than it needs to be, characters aren't picked up and dropped like a toddler with a toy and the "Guns make the USA Great, everybody should have one, preferably several" bullshit is at least minimally disguised and not the whole point of the story. Btw, Stephenson, the refutation of your argument on this is splashed all across the news these last few days I mean years I mean decades.. I mean the last century. Let's face it, reform has been over-due in your country since the end of the era of the Wild West. Anyway, the only book by this guy that I've read and thought was better was Zodiac, which manages to remain grounded in reality through-out instead of jumping the shark or giant rat like this does. Aug 31, Marina rated it it was amazing. This book is brilliant. It's beautifully disturbing. It flows like a mad river. It's amazing. Admittedly, I have not read much of Stephenson. I read bits and pieces of 'Snowcrash' but found it a bit boring. I have had 'Anathem' highly reccomended to me but found the thickness a bit intimidating. Therefore I am a novice, untainted by Stephenson's apparent brilliance. This book is a little gem. A rough, uncut, blinding gem. I love the smooth transitioning into madness. Until pretty much the end, whe This book is brilliant. Until pretty much the end, when I could stop and think, I did not realize how ludicrously exquisite the descent or rather, ascent into madness was. Most of the critiques towards this book seem to have to do with how it doesn't stand up to the standard of the later Stephenson. I think this beauty should be held as an amazing piece of literature in its own right. Mar 15, Cain rated it it was amazing. This book is one of the funniest things I have ever read. It gets a little outrageous, especially in the second half, but a lot of this is just expanding on real-life ridiculousness which already borders on hyperbole. Sep 13, Tony rated it liked it. The street outside my restaurant pulsates with life. The sidewalks narrow as random guys hold signs offering free advice. Tables are strewn with trinkets for sale. A French hippie carves one-hitters and juggles badly. A wannabe thesbian dresses in crazy outfits and sings and jumps around without rhyme, reason, or talent in a bizarre attempt to entertain at all costs: a sort of street theater of the rude and crude. Book peddlers are spaced every half a length of a north-south block. From time to time, the book peddler, who sets up two long church basement tables almost every day just outside my restaurant, offers a free book as I arrive for work. They remain untouched. I went three months without a day off and convalesced without reprieve from sundry ailments. I began to consider skimming a few articles in the paper or online, a huge accomplishment. I wiled away my days downloading television episodes and watching cheesy DVDs. I was in a rut…. One night, my friend Sandro, the intelligent, scrawny, dancing Dominican who works as a dishwasher and busboy at my restaurant, came in with a find from a stack the book peddler had left up for grabs next to some freebie newspaper carrels. But, one night he found a book that looked interesting. He loves history and natural history in particular. I accepted the book and began to read. Thanks to the enthusiasm displayed by my friend, I was back in the reading groove. By the next morning, I was better than half way through the novel and woke up early. I scanned through metal racks of paperback books on sale and stacked on tables. I looked over the sale racks and tables that are not organized like the rest of the store. Books are not strictly sorted by genre, subject, or author. I just wait for a spine, a cover, or title to leap out at me. Then I read back covers and keep going. Within minutes I had ten or twelve options that I narrowed down to two, two paperback novels and five bucks later I emerged on the street just south of Union Square. I walked through the market, picked up a couple of perfect peaches and walked up to Madison Square Park where they were playing U. Open matches on a big screen in the park. A seat in the outdoor park, a tennis match, a good book with two more ready to read and I found the perfect form of relaxation before going to work. I was hooked. I suppose I have to believe that dreams can be realized even if outside the conventional timeframe. I started cooking professionally when I was ten years older or more than most who start out. Or, I endeavor to make that true. Within pages of starting this novel, I became intrigued by the narrative voice. The voice is first-person. The narrator is not omniscient per se. He sets himself apart from the fray. Immediately, the narrator is complex. He is not omniscient. Yet, he is an observer. We also get the idea from the opening pages that the narrator is a player in the story. What then are his motives for telling the story? The question underlies much of the novel. Perhaps he needs to make himself more integral. This raises the whole question of the autobiographical voice in literature. He endures not because Whitman included portions of autobiography and imposed his own soul on the work in a direct fashion but because the character Whitman is immortalized by lofty words and thoughts. Whitman becomes a symbol, perhaps what he wanted to be or could have been in life, he becomes these things and more in poems. We must assume his facts are at least skewed if accurate. The whole novel has these sort of built in complexities that give the reader so much to contemplate while enjoying clear, straight-forward prose.