Little brother

This book is basically a long shout of anger (or if you like, a Howl) against the 2000-2008 US Administration. In a way it reminded me of both Laura Penny's Your Call Is Important To Us and Al Gore's The Assault on Reason. All of which are basically 'You know what this administration did? And

Show More

another thing...' I'm also reminded of Stargate: The Ark of Truth, a fantasy of triumph over theocratic evil using a box of Truth.

The book is in a way a love letter to urbanism, to the counter-culture, to rebelling. But it also tries to teach about the underlying technologies, which makes for awkward prose. No secret key can be exchanged without page after page of awkward dropped-in text explaining how secret key crypto works. If you're already technical, this is standard fare and I just flipped past it, and if you're non-technical it may be a lot to take in. Stephenson was able to pull it off in Cryptonomicon, but I recall his explanations seemed to fit more seamlessly with the story. The explanations would have worked better as deliberately called-out asides (e.g. perhaps fake Wikipedia pages) or as an appendix (but I know Doctorow wanted kids reading the book to learn as they read).

Also as often happens in this kind of story, there is no believable voice on the other side, they're all cartoon villains. Doctorow does try to show how people could become so terrified they comply with the government, through the person of the boy's father, but it is somewhat unconvincing.

There is also a convenient scene in which video is available of a high-level member of the administration briefing what are really fairly low-level operatives and explaining The Plan, again a bit cartoony.

I can understand the anger and frustration that drove the writing of this book, and I can imagine it connecting to some extent with the usual high-school outsider technogeeks. It is in part a call to Make, which is admirable. I'm just not sure that fiction is the right vehicle to tell this story, given the stranger-than-fiction reality.

Show Less

From technology activist, Creative Commons proponent and self-proclaimed geeky guy Cory Doctorow is Little Brother. This is a realistic sci-fi novel for young adults that is packed with action, techno-speak and a scary but optimistic look at a possible near future for American citizens.

Marcus

Show More

Yallow, our narrator, and his friends are able to sneak out of school by tricking the gait-recognition system and other surveillance tools the schools and city officials have implemented-- including a frighteningly invasive public that uses their phones and the Internet to snitch on possible truant students.
Skipping school to participate in an ARG (alternate reality game), they are caught at the site of a terrorist attack in San Francisco. Marcus and his friends are held by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) at a secret prison. They are interrogated, terrified and treated like they are guilty. After this attack, paranoia, surveillance and distrust are amplified. California has become a police state. Marcus finds himself making choices that may endanger him, his friends and other citizens in his pursuit to take back the civil liberties and freedoms promised by the U.S. Constitution that the DHS has taken away.

This is a dystopian future, but not a future too far from now. It is easy to believe that all of these surveillance technologies are available today to those in power--and maybe they already are. Many of us- as Marcus points out- are guilty of not understanding the technologies all around us. We do not have them working for us.
At first I questioned the how realistic this narrator is. Would a 17 year old boy be this advanced in computers, computer code writing and programming? And then I realized how old I am and more importantly, how dated my own experience with technology must be. Marcus is not so far-fetched. There are so many teens and young adults with these capabilities, experience and drive to tweak and hack and crack so many of the tools used on us and by us every day.

This book will be great for high school age and young adult readers and technology-literate and illiterate adults will enjoy it also. The book is jammed full of interesting ideas, questions and history. It could be very useful for discussions about privacy, terrorism and technology and surveillance and the role of a citizen in our democratic society.

Show Less

I read this book very, very quickly. Little Brother is the story of Marcus, an extremely tech-savvy teen in San Francisco who is imprisoned and abused by the Department of Homeland Security after the Bay Bridge is blown up. He's not a terrorist, but the DHS goons don't care -- he's insufficiently

Show More

willing to give up his rights, and that's enough to mark him as a troublemaker. Marcus is at last released, but his friend Darryl isn't so lucky.

In the aftermath of the attack, San Fran has become a police state. Electronic surveillance is universal, snitching is encouraged, privacy is a memory, and all citizens are being treated as potential terrorists. And that's when Marcus begins to assemble a techno-geek revolt...

I learned a lot from Little Brother, little of it comforting. The book is full of real information about the ways our government uses technology to spy upon us, and usually for no good reason. (For instance: did you know that certain forms of cryptography -- the stuff that allows you to bank online, among other things -- used to be classified as MUNITIONS by the DoD? Knowledge is power, and they wanted all of it.)

Then again, the story of Marcus gives me hope, because it dramatizes an obvious truth: there's no nefarious technology in the world that can't be hacked by a smart, motivated teenager. And a network of clever teens? Cannot be stopped. Just as the late, unlamented record industry.

Little Brother is more proof that novels written for the so-called Young Adult market tend to be superior to Serious Adult Novels. Why? Because, unlike adults, teens expect a compelling story and do not consider it their duty to sit and be bored by pompous obscurity.

I plan to look into more of Cory Doctorow's work.

Show Less

Summary: Seventeen-year-old Markus and three of his friends are cutting school when terrorists blow up the San Francisco Bay Bridge. Caught out on the streets, they're picked up by the Department of Homeland Security, and detained and questioned for days under suspicion of being involved in the

Show More

attack. When Markus is finally released, he finds his city on lock-down, with the DHS having ramped up surveillance in every sphere of daily life. But Markus isn't willing to let the government strip away his freedom without a fight, and he eventually becomes the figurehead for a new counterculture rebellion. But this rebellion makes him a marked man, and anyways, how can one kid possibly hope to take down the government-funded monolith of the DHS?

Review: This book terrified me. Admittedly, I don't read a lot of horror novels, so I don't have a huge basis for comparison, but this book is easily the most terrifying thing I've read in years. And what's terrifying isn't a bunch of supernatural ghosties and goblins... just about everything in this book is either real, or completely plausibly almost real - and that's what scares the crap out of me.

The title, of course, is a reference to Orwell's 1984, and therefore this book tends to get classed with other dystopian novels - i.e. as science fiction. The thing is, though, that calling this book science fiction is a misnomer. Almost all of the technology that Doctorow describes already exists; the surveillance systems he describes as being taken over by DHS are already in place, invading our privacy in a million subtle ways every day. Little Brother is technically speculative fiction, but the scary thing is that it doesn't have to speculate very far: its world could easily be our world tomorrow... literally, tomorrow. That's not dystopian, that's just... topian. And that makes it one important read. Regardless of your politics, regardless of your views on issues of privacy and free speech and terrorism and national security and personal liberty, Little Brother highlights the knife edge on which our society is walking, and the terrible ways in which it can go wrong.

The thing is, although this book is terrifying and important, and although it wears its politics on its sleeve and very clearly has A Message, it's still a really, really good read. The style might not be to everyone's taste; there are frequent mini-lectures about security, or encryption, or the history of the counterculture movement, or LARPing, or computer programing, or whatever. That may sound deathly boring to you - I certainly would have thought so before I read this book - but the thing is, Doctorow writes them so well, and they're all so immediately relevant to the plot, that they wind up completely fascinating, even for non-techno-geeks like me. (With the exception of one digression that involved a lot of IP addresses that poor Kirby Heyborne still had to read out loud for the audiobook.)

The technobabble and the terrorism plots aren't all there is to this book, either. Marcus is a thoroughly believable teenaged boy, and Doctorow's also really good at capturing the realities of being seventeen. Little Brother is as effective of a coming-of-age story as it is a technogeek-rebellion-political-commentary, and where it really wins is by so effortlessly merging the two together. So, to sum up: the narrator's sympathetic, the story is fascinating, the writing is engaging, you learn some cool things along the way, it makes you think critically about the world around you, and the issues it raises are of crucial importance to modern society. Why aren't you reading this book already? 5 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: Read it. Even if you don't like sci-fi, or avoid young adult novels on principle, this one is worth your time. I may be older than twenty-five, but trust me... at least on this.

Show Less

A chilling, much-too-possible story of abuses by the Department of Homeland Security after another major terrorist attack. Marcus, a bright 17-year-old, is falsely detained, and begins to use his hacking and security-evasion hobbies to support a resistance. Great book: I couldn't stop reading it.

Have you ever had the experience of remembering why you enjoyed something? Like reading? Where you sit back and get involved in the book? The characters? The action? And suddenly you find yourself fifty pages from where you started, and a couple of hours have mysteriously disappeared in what feels

Show More

like a few minutes? Little Brother by Cory Doctrow brought back that original feeling to me.

Little Brother takes place in a post 9/11 future that may be just a tomorrow away. Little Brother is about Marcus Yallow, a seventeen year old San Francisco hacker, and his friends who happen to find themselves at the wrong place at the wrong time, a terrorist attack that fells San Francisco's Bay Bridge, killing 4000 people, and Marcus and his friends are rounded up by the Department of Homeland Security, DHS ( a title worthy of Joseph Goebbels) in the wake of the attack and detained in a makeshift prison on Treasure Island in the San Francisco harbor. The justification of their imprisonment is nothing more than the profile of being a teenager, which can be used to fit the description of any anti-social behavior. Marcus and friends are held incommunicado and subjected to interrogations and various humiliations designed to break them and reveal more terrorist plots. After a week Marcus and friends are released with the exception of one, Darryl. After their release the friends find San Francisco under everything but stated martial law under the auspices of the DHS, and the friends go their own ways. Marcus wants revenge on the system that abused him and becomes a reluctant revolutionary. Another drops out right away wanting only to return to a normal life, and a third helps Marcus set up an underground internet communications system for those who want to resist the DHS' authority and return civil liberties to San Francisco. Echoes of today's events buzz through the pages and I think future readers will find it relevant and as resonant as some of George Orwell's predictions in 1984. Little Brother is listed as YA (young adult) book but I wouldn't let that label deter an adult from reading it, I found it a very engrossing book and if it is truly a YA book it doesn't talk down to it's audience. If there are some critiques of the novel they're MINOR. Some of the information given is basic and repeated a couple of times in the beginning but that's hardly noticeable and probably of benefit to the YA audience the book is intended for. Some of the discussions of the through the rabbit hole world of hacking and cryptographic codes made my head swim a little, but things that close to math usually do. There's a bit of teenage wish fulfillment in it, bully retribution, teenagers are smarter than adults and are the last chance for freedom in America, but given the circumstances and parameters laid out in the book it is a perfectly plausible reaction to the events described in the book.

A "Modern Classic" is an encomium that's used all the readily in blurbs, and those books and authors have faded to obscurity, but I think Little Brother lives up to that sentiment and is a book that should be put into schools curriculum's and remain there for a long time to come. Hopefully in Little Brother the young people who read it will see a path they want to take this country.

Show Less

Not totally convincing, but good fun nonetheless.

Marcus at 17 is a techno-geek. He understands cryptology, and it's place in social politics, but he's still young and he also enjoys computer games, hanging with his mates, and even girls now and again. When he's arrested on suspicion of helping

Show More

plan/plot a terrorist bomb on California's Bay bridge, he's rightly indignant.

TO BE CONTINUED

Show Less

This book is two things.

Firstly, it's a teen techno-thriller about about the aftermath of a terrorist attack in San Francisco. The response of the US government is to massively increase surveillance, and engage in a program of infiltrating social networks and detaining (without charge) those whom

Show More

they believe to be a "threat".

The story follows Marcus, one of a group of four friends who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and ended up being detained for several days by the Department of Homeland Security. When he's released, he discovers that one of his friends was kept in detention. Everybody thinks he was a victim of the terrorist attack, and the friends who were released have been threatened with permanent detention (or worse) if they reveal anything about their captivity or that of their friend.

Marcus reacts to the injustice of this situation by forming an underground network of SF kids who work to subvert the surveillance systems put in place by DHS, and to communicate uncensored information about what's going on.

As a techno-thriller I feel it's moderately successful. It's not a very complicated plot, the characterisation is pretty simple, and it's always pretty clear who the good guys and bad guys are. It's still a good read though, and I'm pretty sure I'd have lapped it all up as a 15 year old, no questions asked.

However, in my mind the most important thing about this book is that it serves as a surprisingly detailed and technically accurate primer on cryptography and security systems. It talks in detail about why cryptography is useful, gives some excellent non-mathematical explanations of how it works, and describes a number of completely realistic scenarios for its use.

It describes the ease with which a lot of common security infrastructure can be compromised, and details the many ways in which a population can be subjected to surveillance without realising it. It asks questions about the point of security and surveillance, and how successful these measures are in preventing terrorism.

This book teaches subversive techniques - there's no doubt about that. If you couldn't figure it out from the clues given in the story itself, it even includes a bibliography telling you where to go for real up-to-date information on this stuff.

However it's also aiming to teach important lessons about what security and privacy mean, why we have them, and how to tell the difference between the appearance and the real thing.

This book will give you some reasons to think hard about the world around you, and I suspect it'll change the lives of quite a few younger readers (for the better).

Show Less

A very interesting and relevant book warning of the dangers of a state security apparatus that gets out of control, even in a democracy. Extreme measures are accepted by complacent citizens in order to keep us safe from "terrorists", but not only do the security organs cause us far more problems

Show More

than the "terrorists" (the book rightly makes the point that despite the high visibility and high body count of a handful of "terrorist" events, statistically the danger from "terrorism" is minute), but in fact they also fail to catch the "terrorists". And in making the complacent majority feel safer (although not making them any safer in reality as the "terrorists" are still out there, uncaught), a great number of the poor, young, marginalised, different, thoughtful, concerned, caring citizens are victimised by the same state security organs which are supposed to be protecting ALL citizens - aren't they?
Of course in the book there are heroes who take on the establishment. I have no idea whether all the technical computer-related stuff is feasible, but it certainly makes for a good story and is understandable enough (and where it isn't understandable it doesn't really matter).
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"

Show Less

Little Brother, by Cory Doctrow, is one of those rare Young Adult titles that may be enjoyed by adults as well as teens. The plot for this book, the Department of Homeland Security imposes Martial Law on San Francisco after a terrorist attack, is so adult enough, that if the main protagonist of

Show More

this story were not modeled after a high school kid, this could just as easily been a Tom Clancy type spy thriller.

The opening pages are used to quickly introduce most of the main characters. Doctrow does an excellent job taking non-teens into the world a gaming and the use of technology used by gamers and kids in general. We know this story is set in the future by some of the surveillance technology used in schools, but we also know this is a not too distant future, maybe only a year or so from our now, 2009 almost 2010, because there is nothing really unfamiliar about the technology introduced, only the uses the technology is put to.

I also applaud Doctrow for giving us a group of buddies that is mixed in terms of race, eating choices and other preferences. Younger readers may not pick up on the message that different is good and this older reader hopes that this message may not even be noticed by younger readers because kids groups these days seem to becoming more diverse. The author also makes a point that the law is not always enforced equally when one of the characters speaks about who the DHS will prosecute more than others, a point that Doctrow reinforces when he describes the length of imprisonment for various people picked up by the DHS in this novel.

The book also makes a strong political statement for questioning authority and, under certain circumstances, supporting civil disobedience. Some of this is backed up with a history lesson of what the Free Speech Movement of the ‘60’s was all about and a reminder that if you don’t speak up for what you believe in, you may find you right to speak up taken away. Because of these underlying political messages, this book will no doubt be controversial in some circles.

Perhaps I am over analyzing the content of the book too much. Even if you ignore the political side of the story, it’s a great buddy story, it is a teen romance novel, it is a great hacker story and it is a great adventure story. In short, this is one great book, no matter how you approach it. The only weakly developed characters in the book are the parents, but the parents are not necessarily weak characters.

I’m giving this a full five stars. It appealed to my revolutionary side, I loved the geek appeal and I found the basic premise very realistic and possible. Some people may have problems with the politics of the story, but others will love it.

Show Less

A very timely, and realistic portrayal of how our civil liberties are on their death bed - a 'what if' story that predicts, believably, what would happen after another 9/11 style attack, in a manner that should strike home with its readers. Our country doesn't have a problem with torture and secret

Show More

prisons, this we have learned - what comes next?
Very like some of Scott Westerfeld's books, in theme, pacing and writing style.
The book started out like gangbusters - a 5(6!), but the pace slowed for me considerably. I felt that some repetition seemed sloppy.
I was distracted by whether or not the characters were trustworthy, not an inappropriate train of thought for the story - but one that didn't ultimately satisfy in my reading. Some of the characters didn't seem very dimensional.
These things not withstanding, the importance of this subject at this time in our nation's history is paramount - and I sincerely hope that many people are reading it and taking it to heart. Our future freedoms may well depend on it.

Show Less

Because of the age of the main characters, Little Brother by Cory Doctorow could easily be discounted as a “young adult” novel. It is officially classified as both “Science Fiction” and “Juvenile.” However, the content makes it relevant to any American citizen; young or old. In fact, it

Show More

should be required reading for all.

This is the 1984 for our (and the next) generation. In a post-9/11 world, our level of personal freedom has diminished. This novel is about what can happen when you allow that to go too far.

The story is action-packed and has numerous contemporary references to technology that anyone in the IT word will find hilarious. There are some “geeky” elements like role-playing games and virtual worlds, but the underlying political realities of life after a terrorist attack are the focus of the book. It appears that only those on the “fringe” are aware of how our freedom is slowly eroding. When innocent US citizens are imprisoned because they act against how the government is handling the situation, it begins to get scary and the real paranoia takes hold.

The plot of this novel closely reflects today’s world. The book makes some excellent points as to the value of the security measures that have been imposed since 9/11. Most interesting is a part of Chapter 8 that explains the “mathematics of terrorism.” It gives statistical details as to how many innocent people need to be wrongly incarcerated to catch one real terrorist and the results are frightening.

The message of the book, and one everyone needs to evaluate for themselves, is whether giving up our freedom keeps us safer or can be marked as a “win” for the terrorists. After reading this book, I’m leaning towards the later.

Show Less

After hearing so much praise for this book I was disappointed. I think Cory has some interesting ideas, but the execution falls short. In fact, this is the second book I read of his, and I had the same problem with his other book (Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom). I realize the audience for this

Show More

book is YA, but I still can't but feel disappointed.

I suppose one of the biggest problems I have with the book is that it just comes across like a political gripe fest. This book seems very much a response to the last president's policies. Now I don't condone the actions of our last president (one of the worst we've had in my opinion), but I find it ironic that we currently have a Nobel winning president carrying on much of the same security policies without much fanfare or complaint. I just find his dichotomy of me good you bad a little disturbing; no character in the book comes in between. They're either really bad or really good.

Furthermore, parts of the novel just seem like he's trying to show the world how cool he is or how much he knows. I don't want an author to try and impress me, I want to read a good book. It just didn't dig with me.

Show Less

The time is now. The place is San Francisco. Marcus Yallow, a 17 year old geek and gamer and three of his friends have skipped school to play an Alternate Reality Game, or ARG. Unfortunately for them, they’ve chosen the wrong time to be running around the streets of Frisco with encrypted cell

Show More

phones and wifinders; terrorists blow up the Bay Bridge and parts of the BART system, and Marcus and his friends get picked up by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). They are held in an undisclosed location for five days and questioned relentlessly, subject to psychological tortures. Finally, they are released with stern instructions to say nothing about where they’ve been, only to discover two things: First, that they have been assumed dead in the attacks and their friends and family have begun to mourn, and second, that only three of the four have actually been set free. Darryl, who was injured in the confusion following the attacks, is either still being held or dead, and no one from DHS will say which, or even admit Darryl exists.

Marcus is furious at the DHS, who have ignored the civil rights of hundreds if not thousands of San Franciscans, who tortured him and his friends for no crime more serious than cutting school and being young, who have “disappeared” his friends and neighbors in the name of national security, and who have instituted security measures so draconian that every keystroke is logged and every movement around town is accounted for, measures so draconian that every citizen becomes a suspect but no real terrorists are ever actually found. So Marcus begins to fight back. Using technological know-how and a healthy dose of justified paranoia, he manages to create an off-the-grid version of the Internet, called the Xnet. Using the persona of “M1k3y” (read: Mikey), he recruits hundreds and then thousands of other geeks and activists to set about proving that the government is corrupt, the DHS is the true terrorist organization, and that you can never be free as long as you live in fear.

This is “Brave New World,” “Fahrenheit 451” and “1984” for a new generation, set not in some future which only slightly resembles our own world, but in the here and now. This is a story which could happen tomorrow or next week, not next decade or century. The situation described is not only relevant to our current political climate, but is also frighteningly plausible. It is the sort of book you devour and then look around for someone else to hand it to.

Show Less

Little Brother was a great book that I would highly recommend. The way it talks about technology is quite accessible and also makes you realize just how 'futuristic' the world today is, because what is being done in the book is do-able today. The only thing I disliked about it was the

Show More

over-explanation of some things (ie, Alan Turing's life, which I already knew about), but at other times I was glad of the explanation of things I did not know, so I can see why it all was in there, because it's all worth knowing if you didn't already. The best and scariest part of it was how realistic it was. No over the top technology or events, just a bombing in San Fransisco that leads to extreme security, all of which seems possible in the current United States. I'm always impressed when adults can seem to accurately capture teenage life, and this was a great example of that. As the adults become more paranoid and accepting of security (except for the ACLU :)) the teens are the ones to rebel through technology, and the slightly snarky main character laughs at how his high school principle is so uncomprehending of technology. Whether or not these impressions are fully accurate, they certainly capture teenage thought.

Show Less

In some ways, this is not the kind of book I usually read--phrases like "techno-geek" on the cover don't tend to appeal to me. But I picked this one up because both my brother and sister really liked it, and I'm glad I did. Doctorow raises a lot of difficult questions about the trade-offs between

Show More

security and privacy, and tells a gripping story too.

Marcus is a high-school student in the not-too-distant future, at a time when surveillance is increasing and school-issued notebooks record every keystroke a student makes. Being concerned with privacy and good with computers, Marcus has hacked his notebook to get around the surveillance features and takes other measures like putting gravel in his shoes to outsmart the gait-recognition devices in the school hallways. He's not really a bad guy, though, more concerned with getting out of school to play games with his friends than with using his abilities for any greater, malicious purpose.

Unfortunately, after a terrorist attack in San Francisco, the authorities don't see Marcus' behaviour in such an innocent light. He's grabbed off the street almost arbitrarily by the Department of Homeland Security and accused of being a terrorist. When he isn't immediately willing to give up all his privacy and insists, for example, on seeing a lawyer, the situation only worsens. He's subjected to mild forms of torture until he yields completely, and is eventually released with instructions to tell no one about what happened and a warning that his every move will be watched from then on.

Rather than giving in, though, Marcus decides to fight back against the Department of Homeland Security. As more and more citizens' rights are taken away in the name of safety, Marcus develops an underground network devoted to preserving privacy and freedom. Nothing here is completely black-and-white, though, and many of Marcus' friends and family members oppose his actions. The result is a thought-provoking examination of how far you should go in standing up for your beliefs.

As a side note, the author of this book strongly opposes DRM and has released all his books in free, unprotected electronic formats at the same time as the print releases. This makes him a good guy in my books.

Show Less

Marcus is a hacker. He's adept at getting about the security systems and computer firewalls at his high school. When he and his friends sneak out to explore downtown San Francisco as part of a scavenger hunt, they are caught in the turmoil of a major terrorist attack. Arrested at the scene, Marcus

Show More

is separated from his friends and harshly interrogated by the Department of Homeland Security. After days of terror and degradation, he's released - but one of his friends is not. As San Francisco becomes a police state, Marcus vows to fight for the country he loves in the best way he knows how: computers and the internet.

This was a fascinating book, and a quick read. It's terrifying because many of the events could happen: Patriot Act II, more rights surrendered, constant monitoring and possibility of detainment without legal rights. I loved how it mentioned places like LiveJournal and Fark, too. It made it feel all the more real.

There were two down points. Some of the info dumps were annoying and distracting. It's nice to know the science is real, but come on, I don't need several pages on how servers work and things like that, again and again. The message is also very preachy at times. However, it's a very thought-provoking book, and one that will remain pertinent for years to come.

Show Less

Until the election I want 100,000 teens to read this exciting novel about a teen who overthrows his world. Then it's your turn!

Reading this book will make you smarter. Doctorow has a way of explaining technology that is completely understandable (even if you've never so much as changed your own watch battery) without making you feel like you are reading a computer science textbook. By the end of the novel, you will want to

Show More

run better security on your computer, to say the least, and you will even know which system will give you what you want (it's not Vista). Doctorow's bibliography, as well as the afterwords written by Bruce Schneier and Andrew Huang, will lead you to the resources you need to complete your education and hack your own computer.

The paranoia that runs rampant in this book, though not at all unfounded, is out of control. It is worse than Mel Gibson with a copy of Salinger and beer bottle. If you don't get that reference, run, do not walk, to your nearest library, video store, netflix queue, whatever and borrow Consipracy Theory. It is the 1990's movie version of this book, but with grown-ups instead of teenagers. It's awesome.

If you like what Doctorow had to say about cities, sidewalks and neighborhoods, read up on some Jane Jacobs. Her pièce de résistance, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, or the commonly excerpted essay "The Uses of Sidewalks" (available most recently in The City Reader) are good starters. Look for these books at your local library and change more than your computer habits. "Be like M1k3y: step out the door and dare to be free" (p373).

Show Less

A pretty good companion to Orwell's 1984. I am not sure that this book is quite my favorite, despite its ecstatic reviews. The story is about Marcus, a 17-year old growing up in San Francisco when the city is attacked by terrorists and the government turns against the people in the name of national

Show More

security. Marcus and his friends become the leaders in an underground teen movement to abolish the overbearing government through the use of technology.

I loved some of the technology that Marcus and the other x-netters use, and I think Doctorow does a very good job of explaining things in laymen terms. However, I could never really connect with Marcus who, it seems to me, is going about all of this the wrong way. Taking inspiration from the peace movement of the sixties, Marcus twists the message by encouraging fellow teens to sabotage the DHS through technology. Popular with adults, not so sure about teens, it is still a good and interesting read. Although I think that Cryponomicon is a much better tech novel.

Show Less

I give this book four stars based purely on enjoyment, and one extra star for being very timely and thought-provoking. This book is a "1984" that U.S. citizens can truly relate to. Parts of this story are too familiar to be brushed off as a mere flight of fancy from some paranoid writer's mind. The

Show More

icy chill I felt in my stomach while reading this story wasn't from some imagined monster under the bed, but from the sickening realization that the things I was reading could be our future, some aspects are undoubtedly our current reality. This book stands just as solidly on it's plot as it does it's message, which makes it an enjoyable and important read.

Show Less

This book is awesome. I really enjoyed it. Not perfect, but definitely fantastic.

More than five stars. All young potential ACLU card-holders need to read this book. People who've dismissed the ACLU need to read it (people like me whose memberships have expired may need to get out the checkbook again). What happens when even more of our civil liberties are revoked under another

Show More

PATRIOT Act plan (note the capitals, PATRIOT is an acronym, not a name)? What happens when Homeland Security imprisons US citizens? What happens when investigative journalism is halted for infotainment to air? What is it like to get your news about America from foreign sources because you want to hear an objective story (been there, done that)? What happens when an author believes so passionately about his books and about freedom of speech that he posts the entire book online in multiple download formats? Answer: a book that the adult book clubs need to read as much as the young adults for whom it was written. Learn about tech, learn about other "teen" scenes, speculate on the definition of a terrorist. Read it and think. Added benefit for the liberals: the president's advisor's initials are KR.

Show Less

A book about being a techie teenager in the near future. A book about hacking. A book about freedom of speech, individual rights and how technology and government are getting farther and farther apart.

It's a compelling read. I found that i couldn't put it down. The characters were good and the

Show More

plot moved along. If you want some light reading, you should check it out.

Show Less