Little Brother

(Edited from my response to another review)

I like the book's continuous current of technical ideas. It reminds me of the plonking technical asides in Larry Niven novels, only, well, it's continuous, unrepentant. You're inside the mind and problems of a teenage geek instead of a conventionalized hero.

It's also a refusal to fudge technical detail (as movies and TV shows often so lamely do) in situations where details matter. The issues of security, good and bad, are both vital and sorely misunderstood by the general public these days. Doctorow plows right in there and uses the plot as a series of opportunities to survey real security, from the important basics to both the current state of the art and the current state of travesty with its frightening effects. Geeks care enough about technicalities to know when the experts are wrong.

So, the book has an underlying support of geekitude, but it's about how life doesn't allow geekiness to be enough. The plot is a little melodramatic or simplified, like a political thriller as understood by a teenager who starts out with a simplistic political point of view. But, Marcus runs into the larger ramifications of the things he does, that can't be dealt with by mere hacking, and has to decide to take responsibility for them, which he does, first by higher forms of hacking, but finally by choices that have more to do with responsibility and other people than hacking.

One of the themes of the book is the place of individual heroism in a world where many different people have to be involved for significant change to happen. Can you foresee what the effects of your actions will be? If not, are you still responsible for them? Since you can't do it all yourself, is it worth the effort? Who's going to help? If you don't know, then how can you get people involved? If you get people started, will you be happy with the directions they go? What if your friends let you down? What if you let them down? Marcus and his friends are in the teeth of these kinds of questions throughout the book.

This book is not only insightful, important, and educational, it's also entertaining. I got it at about 3PM and by 8PM I had finished it. I had planned for it to last me several weeks.

More importantly, get copies of this book into the hands of your younger siblings, your children, your young friends, and anyone else you know who has yet to be crushed into conformity by the pressures of corporate life, family, and years of kneeling before The Man. You might just save them, and the world.

What started out as an enjoyable book about a group of "hackers" took an extreme left turn.

The city in which this book takes place, San Francisco, is already filled with anti-war and anti-government and it is not a far stretched idea that the events in this could only happen there.

The author does a good job in portraying the student and teacher who are in favor of government, essentially not liberal; seem unintelligent, timid and unable to discuss opinions in a calm manner. A student in Marcus' class, who deems what DHS is doing is for their protection, is made to be an anger filled child who is unable to express himself without interrupting others and shouting.

A reporter from Fox News is shown as hateful and is described as acting superior to others. Fox News as a whole is portrayed as "evil". I should not be surprised that a book dripping with liberal bias and spin is being marketed to children but I find that I am. This book takes place in a world where NONE of the events would EVER or could EVER happen but it is reviewed as a very real and very possible future for the U.S.

I feel sorry that liberal books like this are being passed off as real literature. I would NEVER recommend this book to ANYBODY for it does nothing more than to reinforce the stereotypes that are being spouted by the left.
The fact that an author would write a book about undermining the United States government and in sense acting like terrorists because you're being tracked or photographed is disturbing to say the least.

One character in Little Brother refers to America as "Gulag America" and this did nothing more than to enforce that the author has no shame. To compare the U.S to a Gulag is despicable.

In short the book has such a liberal spin, by the time you finish it you'll be dizzy.

I had already downloaded and read the free ebook version of the book and found it so good, so filled with ideas (techy, political, social...) that I had to buy the dead-tree version just so I could lend it to people that would benefit from the knowledge therein. So far, all have enjoyed it.
Just go on and get it, I guarantee you'll be entertained... at the very least you'll come out a little wiser

There's no question that terrorists (of various stripes) pose a threat to free societies. The real question is whether the anti-terrorist measures work. This book explores how a young man and his friends run headfirst into that question.

While I am one who believes that much of what we've done in the US has made us less free as a people, I would hope that those who disagree with me will have read through a book like this to test their own conclusions. (Don't get me wrong--I'm not pro-terrorist, and I'm all for *smart* security measures.)

Buy it for yourself. Buy it for the neighbor's kids. Buy it for your local library. Buy it as an act of protest, an act of patriotism, an act of loyal dissent. Heck, just buy it because it's a book you won't want to put down.