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 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. ( )

Near-future sf about the consequences of a terrorist attack on the San Francisco Bay Bridge, as Homeland Security moves into the city to "protect" everyone by turning them all into suspected terrorists and watching their every move. Scary and all too realistic. ( )

Cory Doctorow is one of my favorite authors and a major activist in the world of online rights and freedoms. "Little Brother"is one of his best books yet. While it has a teenage protagonist and is marketed as a YA book, it is intelligently written and easily accessible to adults. It would make an excellent short read for anyone.

The story is of a young man who gets caught up in a terrorist attack in San Francisco. He and several friends are taken in for questioning, and one of them never returns. The city turns into a police state over the next few months, with the government tracking people's movements and activities and clamping down on protests. Rather than meekly accepting the situation, though, the teen and his friends fight back, using their technological know-how to show just how useless much of the security is against anyone but innocent citizens and exposing the government's own misdeeds.

The plot does seem a bit dated now that a new administration is in place, and at times the book does get a little heavy-handed about promoting freedom over false security. However, it still serves as a warning against the dangers of 'security theater' and the possible abuses that universal surveillance and blind patriotism can bring. In many ways, it's a virtual how-to manual for subverting the system to expose these dangers. ( )

I had been wanting to read this book ever since Scott Westerfeld mentioned it on his blog which was at least a year ago.

Anyway, I finally finished it, and I enjoyed it... but I did find that all the techie speak that was in it was over my head and I could have cared less for it. Overall I really enjoyed it, but if anyone is the least bit offended by politically charged books - you may want to take a sneak peak into it while at the bookstore or library before heading in completely.

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 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. ( )

1984, without the doomsaying and hopelessness. ( )

Reviewed by Jonathan Hunt (The Horn Book, July/Aug. 2008, Vol. 84, No. 4)

Reviewed by Austin Grossman (The New York Times Book Review, Sept. 14, 2008, Vol 113, No. 37)

Reviewed by April Spisak (Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, No. 2008, Vol 62, No. 3)

Reviewed by Chris Shoemaker (School Library Journal, May 2008, Vol. 54, No. 5)
'Raising pertinent questions and fostering; discussion, this techno-thriller is an out-standing first purchase.'

Reviewed by Cindy Dobrez (Booklist, Apr. 1, 2008, Vol 104, No. 15)

http://vnweb.hwwilsonweb.com.login.ez...

Lots of action, way to close to what could be our ( at least the American's)reality given the unprecedented power given to Homeland Security in terms of detaining suspects...a good read for people into technology or those who would like a glimpse into technology's dark side...

I'm reading this in installments through DailyLit though I got the hardback free at ALA. I loved Doctorow's program, but this book is not doing it for me. The kids aren't believable teenagers and the amount of stop and explain what something means is killing me. I would have assumed that the main audience of this book would not have needed most of these explanations and they come off clunky and false. I still love him and what he's trying to do/say, but I think I'll stick to his non-fiction.eta - I gave up about a third of the way in. Too painful. ( )

Guess it's aimed at late-teeangers. An enjoyable read, but fails to fully satisfy. ( )

A great read about technology, the internal and contemporary issues. The reality of a police stat as the corruption in government. A wonderful story about abuse of revenge along with romance and a vibrant reality. AHS/LM

Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow. A great book that plays on the readers inner paranoia. When I finished this book I was so paranoid. I encrypted y computer and my flash drive with like five different programs and to access each program you needed to know a 50 digit password and each one had a different password. All really important things like passwords and such, I wrote it all on the tissue paper that quickly dissolves in water and I wrote it in invisible ink and always kept it on my person. Yes I went psychotic but that just shows the skill of the writer, Great for anyone regardless of your feelings towards our government. ( )

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 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. ( )

This is a wonderful book and I would reccomend it to almost anyone! ( )

I own this book, but had put off reading it for reasons I can't remember now. Eventually I picked it up and I just couldn't stop. Doctorow weaves a brilliant story that takes place in a world that's somewhat like our own, while at the same time, being completely different. I want him to write more YA, because I enjoyed his style. ( )

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 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). ( )

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 plan/plot a terrorist bomb on California's Bay bridge, he's rightly indignant. So indignent that he refuses to unlock his phone, or provide his email passwords. Homeland Security is not amaused. Released and re-united with his friends, Marcus realises LA has changed with HS determined to catch the terrorists and prevent any future attacks. Even if it does mean some slight infringements on civil liberites. After all it is Life before Freedom is it not? Not in Marcus's eyes and he sets about trying to show the entirity of HS what fools they are.

It was quite an odd feeling walking around London as a visitor while reading this book. You really do notice just how intrusive some 'security' measures are. And the false positive problem, so aptly described in the book, gives rise to real statistics like only 1 crime is soved per 1000 CCTV cameras.

That said, it's a novel, and at times overly dramatic. I don't think that any security service anywhere, would laughingly allow more terrorists attacks to occur, in order for more public fear to increase their opperational mandate. But like Crichton maintains in 'Stae of Fear' I don't suppose they are at adverse to being giving more powers, or manouevering to gain them. Civilions do after all make life harder for professional everywhere.

This ebook version comes with Cory's plaundits for booksellers he likes as chapter headings. All well and good, but in a dramatically anti'big powers' novel like this it comes across as bit odd to find him singing the praises of Amazon, Borders, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones et al, who between them have put more pressure on the survival of independant stores, and do more surveiling and data mining than almost anyone else. Amazon's DRM lockdown of the Kindle for example doesn't get a mention. Cory does rate a few independant stores, but he could easily have devoted the entire book to them without needing to add in the big guys.

The biggest problem with Little Brother, is 'what to do about it'. It's all very well going all activist, and disruptionist, but as Marcus discovers that won't actually help solve the problem. Cory does give a weak example in the last chapters of the book, but I feel this is hardly stressed anywhere near enough as being the only 'correct' course of action. Most younger readers will come away with the idea of fighting the system, without the message of how to do it.

That said anything, which encourages people to read, to be aware of politics and society and to carry on the fight for basic rights for all, is to be applauded.

................................................................................................................... ( )

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 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. ( )

I'm reading this for our upcoming book group, but I'm having a hard time getting into it. I'm sure it'll pick up once I get to the techno-geek revolution part!

So far I like: the accurate and interesting geek talk and technical explanations (knowing a bunch of it already made me feel smart); all the realistic SF settingsSo far I don't like: the fact that I keep putting it down and forgetting about it - the story isn't keeping me reading at any sort of pace

Readers Annotation:
Marcus and his friends skip school to meet up to play Harajuku Madness. While they are out the San Francisco bay bridge is targeted in a terrorist attack. The group of teenagers is profiled as potential terrorists and are picked up and held for questioning and undergo psychological torture. After Marcus is released he is determined to thwart Homeland Security for what they did to him and his friends.
Plot Summary:
Marcus and his friends skip school to meet up and play Harajuku Madness. While they are out the San Francisco bay bridge is attacked by terrorists. Because they fit the profile, Marcus and his friends are detained and interrogated in Alcatraz. After Marcus is released he is determined to thwart Homeland Security and find out what has happened to his friend who doesn’t come back. Homeland Security is taking advantage of the attack to usurp the rights of American citizens, detaining them if their BART use is questionable is one example of this. Marcus can tell that his laptop has been tampered with when he gets home because he was the one who built it. As a way to get around being spied on by the government he takes an Xbox universal and Paranoid Linux as an operating system. Paranoid Linux allows the user to encrypt everything, with the assumption the user is under attack. Marcus makes up CD’s of Paranoid Linux and distributes them to hackers throughout the city, thus creating a network of rebel teens that don’t like having their freedoms taken away.
Evaluation:
This book was really interesting. Although I’m not normally a Sci-Fi reader I found I had a difficult time putting this particular book down. The character, Marcus, is very believable. His methods to thwart the government in his attempt to locate his missing friend also seem plausible. This book really makes you think about the potential invasion of privacy that our government could resort to in the name of protecting its citizens under the Department of Homeland Security. It opens your eyes to the rights and freedoms that we take for granted everyday as American citizens. Even after I was finished with the book I had a hard time dropping the concepts that were set in it. I found myself searching on the internet for Paranoid Linux and reading about the MIT student that hacked the Xbox.
Reason Included: This book was a required read, but was one of my favorites from my YA materials class. LITTLE BROTHER was nominated for the 2008 Hugo, Nebula, Sunburst and Locus Awards. It won the Ontario Library White Pine Award, the Prometheus Award as well as the Indienet Award for bestselling young adult novel in America's top 1000 independent bookstores in 2008.
Ages: 14+/Interests: Espionage, Mystery, Science Fiction, and Action-Adventure.
Authors Website: http://craphound.com/bio.php ( )

All I can say for this book is that the author did his best to ruin a really good story. The concept, the plot--these things are really wonderful, but this book needed some severe editing to get rid of the pages and pages of exposition that delve into the nitty-gritty of the technology and the history/politics of the technology. I understand why Doctorow wanted this information in the book--it is very clear what his personal philosophies are--but the story suffers. The pace suffers. The characters outside of Marcus, the hacker boy who narrates this cautionary story about what happens when liberty is exchanged for an illusion of security, are thin and largely interchangeable. Instead of letting their personalities develop naturally through the events and dialogue in the book, Marcus simply tells us what they are like. There are these fleeting references to things (Jack Kerouac, for instance) that are supposed to be meaningful but end up feeling like a random page from wikipedia dropped into the story.

I'm very disappointed in this book because I wanted to love it. I wanted to teach it side by side with Orwell in my English classes. And instead I had to skim and make deals with myself to force myself to finish it. If a good editor would have gone through this book with a ruthless eye (maybe creating appendices for the people who want to know every detail about the hacking methods?), it could have been a very powerful book. ( )

This book is a mad romp through a San Francisco stripped of its civil rights in the wake of a terrorist attack, accompanied by a tech-saavy teen who turns activist after a wrong-place-wrong-time arrest has him under suspicion and disappears a friend entirely.

I loved much about this book - it reads fast and snappy and is full of action and fascinating information about technology, safety, and privacy. His main character has a great voice and can spoon-feed you exposition and technobabble and make it /fun/. It was entertaining to the core.

Unfortunately, it's also quite heavy-handed. Doctorow never bothers to hide his agenda or his politics, which is nice (I'd far rather that that a book which tries to sneak up on you sideways), but I do wish that he'd taken a more subtle look at things and used a little less white and black in his painting of characters. I especially wish that he hadn't managed to either vilify or stupefy nearly every adult in his book that pushes teens to angry activism (Trust no one under 25? /Really/?).

Little Brother is one of those books that's /almost/ brilliant. Doctorow is clever and interesting and engaging through much of his book. If only he weren't also simplistic and preachy, this could have been an absolute gem. ( )

Great sci-fi read for teens. Local San Francisco locations make this especially good for readers in our area. ( )

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 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. ( )