The Big U

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.

The novel sets its collegiate mayhem inside American Megaversity, a colossal eight-tower concrete complex that traps forty thousand students above highway interchanges and labyrinthine sewer tunnels.

Stephenson follows student government president Sarah Jane Johnson t...