Rick Allen's Reviews > The Confusion

Years ago, I started the first book in this series, Quicksilver, but only got about 1/4 through it and gave up. But I love Neal Stephenson's other, more sci-fi, books, and having read just about all of them except the Baroque Cycle and The Mongoliad, I decided to try again. I enjoyed it more this time, and had the patience to let it go, waiting to understand "what it was about." I thought it was about the conflict between Isaac Newton and Gottfried Liebnitz (re which invented calculus first) as seen by the fictional character Daniel Waterhouse, but the author also spent a lot of time on other characters, particularly Jack Shaftoe, ancestor of a main character in Cryptonomicon (which I loved). I finished that book, and while I still didn't know "what it was about," I enjoyed it enough to start the second book, The Confusion.
I now believe these books are less about "something" (meaning a plot point or conflict), than about exposing the reader to what life was like in the last 1600's for various types of people, by telling their stories. Sailors, pirates, vagabonds, minor players in the community of "People of Quality", and others. It also delves into the concepts of currency and finance, and how it evolved. A couple things I learned about early currency: pieces of eight were literally coins that could be broken into eight pieces to allow for smaller amounts (sort of like exchanging a quarter for five nickels, except you'd snap the quarter into five pieces), and that Isaac Newton was in charge of England's mint in his later years.
So to summarize, these books give a great insight into actual life in the 1600's, while telling intriguing stories. This book in particular has a number of hair-raising stories of Jack Shaftoe's adventures, gaining (as the author puts it) all the money in the world twice and losing it twice. His Trial by Ordeal as ordered by a pirate queen is particularly good!