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Type of bind: Hardcover
Format: Bargain Price
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 816
Printing Date: April 01, 2004
Sale Popularity Level: 7015
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Product Description:
In the year 1689, a cabal of Barbary galley slaves -- including one Jack Shaftoe, a.k.a. King of the Vagabonds, a.k.a. Half-Cocked Jack, lately and miraculously cured of the pox -- devises a daring plan to win freedom and fortune. A great adventure ensues, rife with battles, chases, hairbreadth escapes, swashbuckling, bloodletting, and danger -- a perilous race for an enormous prize of silver ... nay, gold ... nay, legendary gold that will place the intrepid band at odds with the mighty and the mad, with alchemists, Jesuits, great navies, pirate queens, and vengeful despots across vast oceans and around the globe.
Meanwhile, back in Europe ...
The exquisite and resourceful Eliza, Countess de la Zeur, master of markets, pawn and confidante of enemy kings, onetime Turkish harem virgin, is stripped of her immense personal fortune by France's most dashing privateer. Penniless and at risk from those who desire either her or her head (or both), she is caught up in a web of international intrigue, even as she desperately seeks the return of her most precious possession -- her child.
While ...
Newton and Leibniz continue to propound their grand theories as their infamous rivalry intensifies, stubborn alchemy does battle with the natural sciences, nobles are beheaded, dastardly plots are set in motion, coins are newly minted (or not) in enemy strongholds, father and sons reunite in faraway lands, priests rise from the dead ... and Daniel Waterhouse seeks passage to the Massachusetts colony in hopes of escaping the madness into which his world has descended.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
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Excellent. This continuation of the Baroque Cycle Saga is even more enthralling than Quicksilver. Stephenson maintains his storytelling style of exquisite detail, interspersed with quirky, ribald humour and intellectual subtleties. Expanding the domain of action beyond Europe to North Africa and the meso-American colonies, The Confusion surely sets the stage for a resounding conclusion in System of the World. A masterpiece of intertwined storylines, unexpected developments, and personal struggles. This vast voyage also provides the reader with the context from which our current systems of economy, philosophy, and science emerged. If you have the hours to devote to these tomes, grab all three volumes and immerse yourself in the saga.
Rated by buyers 
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Maybe I'm quibbling, but I feel like I should warn prospective buyers that the binding on the hardcover version of this book is totally insufficient for its size and length. I'm only 200 pages in (so my rating isn't wholly meaningful, but it's required in order to post a review), and the binding is cracking and the book feels as if it's ready to fall apart. The content is great so far, but the prospective buyer should be forewarned.
Rated by buyers -
Even Amazon is confused about the numbering in the series. Timeline-wise, Confusion isn't volume 2; it's volume 4. Its characters' lives pick up right after the end of Odalisque, which followed King of the Vagabonds, which followed Quicksilver.
Having said that, the very first three books were a good read, as was Cryptonomicon. I look forward to Confusion.
Confused yet?
Rated by buyers -
So you've read the first, and you can't help noticing that many people quit on the Baroque trilogy at that point. Should you keep going?
I guess it depends. This is a trilogy that is after enormous ideas. Where a straight history would focus on finance or economics or science or math or transportation or politics or power or even the human heart as the driving force behind history, only a novelist could demonstrate dramatically how all of these forces are related and combined and intertwined.
Or, as Stephenson puts it in this second volume, "Because it made a good story, Bob supposed, and people could only make sense of complicated matters through stories."
Of the three volumes, this is the most narratively straightforward, and it covers virtually the entire planet, focusing mainly on Jack Shaftoe and Eliza. It has everything that makes Stephenson engaging-- some great action sequences, some hilarious bursts of comic scene and dialogue, and large and complex ideas worked out in many ways.
Stephenson remains a master of pacing, and nobody can come up with so many different ways to set scenes of conversation.
And if this trilogy is Lord of the Rings, Cryptonomicon is the Hobbit-- you owe it to yourself to dig out Crypto again for all the many many many ways in which it is linked to this trilogy. Much of what connects them is easily forgotten (I had, for instance, forgotten that the mountain named after Eliza in this trilogy is in fact the site of the data haven in Crypto).
This trilogy is genius writing, and if Stephenson has lapsed in any way, it's in requiring a bit more thinking while providing a bit less mindless spectacle. If Quicksilver didn't quite hook you, I still encourage you to keep reading!
Rated by buyers 
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Not as consistent as Quicksilver as I recall the latter. When it was good (as it often was) it was very good, otherwise it was just so so.
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