Little Brother |  | Author: Cory Doctorow
Publisher: Tor Teen
List Price: $17.95
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Seller: gurldejour
Rating:  140 reviews
Sales Rank: 6986
Media: Hardcover
Reading Level: Young Adult
Pages: 384
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.4 x 1.5
ISBN: 0765319853
EAN: 9780765319852
ASIN: 0765319853
Publication Date: April 29, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Marcus, a.k.a “w1n5t0n,” is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works–and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school’s intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems.
But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they’re mercilessly interrogated for days.
When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows that no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: to take down the DHS himself. |
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 140
 An Avid Teenage Reader's Opinion November 3, 2009
Alyssa M. Kirk (Los Angeles, CA United States)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I'd give this 2.5 stars.
Marcus Yallow (aka w1n5ton) is a 17-year old high school senior living a care free life playing video games and writing programs with his friends in San Francisco. Until...one day he chooses the wrong day to cut school.
Marcus, his best friend Darryl and some other buddies ditch school to look for clues for their favorite ARG (Alternate Reality Game - they look for clues online as well as in the real world).
Suddenly BOOM! A huge explosion hits (you later find out it was the Oakland Bay Bridge blowing up) that sends the city into chaos.
Darryl is stabbed while they try to flag down help, and they all end up kidnapped by the government. Taken to a remote island, they suffer torture, must give up all their passwords and usernames and spend grueling hours in interrogation.
Eventually they're released but without Darryl. Marcus soon realizes that his city has become a police state where everyone is constantly watched by the DHS (Dept of Homeland Security). Marcus and friends decide to rebel against the government to save their city and their friend.
And that is where the fun stops. After the all the excitement and explosions wear off the rest of the book is slow paced and boring. I had to force myself to pick up the book and finish reading it. The only reason I did was because the book was due back to the library the next day.
The story starts turning into a political message about how to government overreacts to things and how the people are really in charge and blah blah blah. I watch the news. I read the paper. I'm informed. When I read, I want to be entertained... swept into a fantastic tale and away from the real world. I'm not looking for a head pounding political message in my fiction.
And, the whole point of the book was supposed to be kids fighting back using technology and secretly hacking into computers and breaking into secret facilities and save their friend! WRONG!
*Spoiler Alert*
Marcus finally confides in his parents who get him in touch with a reporter friend who helps expose all nefarious deeds. The justice system takes over and all is well. So 97.43% of what he did leading up to his talk with the reporter could have never happened and you would have gotten the same end result.
In the end they just use the media and lawyers and all that junk to get the bad guys. So while I was expecting them to hack into the governments secret files and infiltrate the place where their friend in being kept and single handedly expose the foul ways of the DHS, all I got was a half-baked ending.
* End of Spoiler Stuff *
Also, (aside from the main characters) there was little character development. Even his best friends stayed flat. In fact after they get out of the prison they're cast aside as if they didn't exist and magically appear in the last chapter after all the dust has cleared.
He does meet this one girl whom he shares a romantic relationship and is his constant companion throughout the rest of the book. But there were a lot of key characters that show up during his quest that are just like "Here's what I look like. Here's some important information. Okay bye-bye!"
The parts that were enjoyable were enjoyable. It was fun while it lasted but all in all it was just a political message wrapped in a clever disguise of teenage techno-geek rebellion.
 Stand Up For What You Believe In October 26, 2009
L. Gibaldi
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I'm not tech savvy. I don't know how to hack into a computer and my favorite video game system is still Sega Genesis. Regardless, I loved Little Brother, not just because of Doctorow's conversational storytelling, or because of its inspirational message, but because it made me want to try to be more observant. To be something more. Go figure a YA tech/sci-fi book would do that for me.
In Little Brother, Cory Doctorow introduces the reader to a very secure, very monitored San Francisco. Marcus, or w1n5t0n, is a 17 year old who knows how the system works. He's smart, fast and can hack into, or override, almost any security system, including the ones at school. When skipping class, he and his friends find themselves in the middle of a terrorist attack. After being taken in for brutal questionings for five days, the group discovers that the city wasn't how they left it. The Department of Homeland Security took over and now monitors everything. The kids can't walk anywhere without being watched, can't talk without being tracked. Instead of letting DHS get away with it, Marcus decides to fight. Using his advanced intellect and army of like-minded youths, he figures out ways to take down the DHS, to make them realize that it's not smart to mess with freedom.
I like how Doctorow made this average hacker (and ex-LARPer) into someone people look up to, not a geek high schoolers pick on. In other words, Doctorow made computer dorks look cool. Not just that, he made education look cool. Marcus quotes the Declaration of Independence and continuously searches the Internet for more information. It's Marcus's intellect that plays a major role in the story.
That said, I really liked Marcus. He's a good guy, one I probably would have wanted to be friends with in high school. I really liked his group of friends and their relationships with one another. I was slightly disappointed with how some aren't mentioned as much after the middle of the book, but at least the lack of contact is mentioned.
The book has a compelling story that may be too much for some. This pre-attack California is scary and a little too telling. It shows how anyone can and should stand up for their rights and although it isn't easy, it's worth it. Doctorow's story flows nicely, occasionally interrupted only to define the technological terms Marcus is mentioning. In that sense, the book is extremely educational.
What I liked most was, incidentally, the bibliography in the back of the book. Doctorow, someone who constantly speaks out against Internet censoring, includes a list of resources for those interested in continuing their education in either freedom of speech or, well, hacking. The afterword even contains stories from well known hackers - those who do it for a living for corporations. Basically, Doctorow is saying "yes, you do it now, some may say it's bad, but it's actually awesome. Want to get paid for it?"
All in all, Little Brother is an excellent book for those interested in technology or, even simply, freedom. It's an excellent book for teenagers and I can definitely see them being very addicted to it. And it shows - the book was translated over and over again by, that's right, fans from around the world. There's even a Brail version.
So check out the securities around you. Stand up for what you believe in. And always use your voice.
Jamming The Thought Police October 8, 2009
darklordzden (Australia)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
San Francisco, The Near Future: Seventeen year old Marcus Yarrow lives a privileged middle-class existence with his parents in an affluent suburb of the city by the bay. The kind of highly intelligent kid who can run rings around the hall surveillance software that has already made its way into his high school, Marcus fills his spare time futzing about with computers, programming and playing Alternate Reality Games with his friends Daryl, Jolu and Van. During the course of playing just such an ARG on the streets of San Francisco, Marcus and friends find themselves unwittingly caught up in a major terrorist attack on the city and, due to a series of misunderstandings and a draconian military response, find themselves imprisoned in a Guantanamo Bay style military prison where they undergo a particularly harsh interrogation at the hands of the department of homeland security. Four are detained, but only three are released and are told that should they relate their experiences to anyone else they will be "disappeared". Back on the streets, Marcus discoverss that San Francisco has virtually been transformed into a police state by a DHS that incorporates all manner of technological surveillance in its war on both terror and civil liberties. But technology is something that Marcus knows more than a little about and furious over his treatment and the illegal detention of his friend, he resolves to take down the DHS in the only way he knows how...
Cory Doctorow's "Little Brother" is apparently aimed at an older teenage audience, but don't let that dissuade you from reading it because it's one of the finest thrillers that you'll read this year. Hell, I'm in my mid-thirties and I couldn't put it down. However, not only is it a good thriller, its also an education on the willful misuse of technology by governments to infringe civil liberties and a warning on how easy it is to overthrow these so-called full-proof systems - the ease with which Marcus manages to swap the Radio Frequency Identity tags ('arphids') and information contained on people's ID and credit cards will have even the most staunch proponents of biometric ID cards breaking out in a nervous sweat. And Doctorow knows of what he writes - after all, he is the co-editor of the "BoingBoing" website and a former director of The Electronic Frontier Foundation. If you harbour any misgivings concerning the technological content of this book, you can lay them to rest; I'm something of a cantankerous technophobe myself and commend Doctorow on explaining the ins and outs of the tech in a way that even I could understand.
That said, the book is not without the occasional problem. There is a vague whiff of parochial superiority running through the story (did the supply teacher brought in to indoctrinate Marcus' high school compatriots with DHS propaganda really have to have a southern accent?) which made me think of the episode of "South Park" where San Franciscans are depicted getting high on the smell of their own farts before having their city destroyed by a "perfect storm" of liberal smugness. This is possibly not too wise a move on Doctorow's part: I know it would've alienated the hell out of me if I was a kid reading it in Houston. Also, a badly disguised caricature of Dick Cheney ("Kurt Rooney"), will no doubt alienate those of a more traditionally right-wing bearing.
That said, I give the book five stars as it's an incisive, well-written and important examination of technology, its potential for misuse and the itinerant arguments that circle the subjects of civil security and individual privacy. And its also a cracking thriller into the bargain.
But, then again, you shouldn't trust me as I'm over twenty five - and readers of the book will know to what that pertains...
 It went on and on. And on. October 6, 2009
Miss Print (NYC)
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
I don't know what I was expecting when I opened Little Brother (2008) by Cory Doctorow. What I do know is that those expectations were largely colored by Doctorow's appearances in various web-comic-strips on XKCD as a red cape wearing blogger who flies around in a hot air balloon.
Anyway, Marcus Yallow is a senior in San Francisco in the near future. He goes to Cesar Chavez High School which makes him one of the most surveilled people in the world. There's a terrorist attack, he's held captive in a Guantanamo Bay-esque prison, he's released and then he decides to use his hacker skillz to get even and reclaim his city from the sinister clutches of Homeland Security.
And as action-packed as that sounds, the book never became more than a mildly interesting bit of tedious reading for me.
I'm fairly tech savvy, and I do worry about privacy and the like, but after finishing Little Brother the only piece of tech-related advice I retained from the story was that crypto is really awesome. Doctorow tries to embed useful information into the story, but it is either too basic to be interesting or too specialized and esoteric to make sense.
I'm not a teenager and I come from a liberal household and I was living in Greenwich Village during 9/11. I found it irritating that Doctorow's character's seemed to operate in a very binary way. Young people (for the most part) opposed the Department of Homeland Security while older people (for the most part) blithely accepted martial law. Really?
Finally, the real reason I disliked this book is that it just was not well put together. With all due respect to the importance of this novel's subject matter, the writing was far from impressing. The descriptions of technology were almost always too long (and often too technical) to be seamlessly integrated into a novel.
The novel's continuity verged on non-existent. For instance, Marcus makes a point of mentioning in the early pages that he is wearing boots for easy removal at metal detectors. Yet when he is released he receives his sneakers back with clean clothes. The core of the story--about Marcus' missing friend--is left hanging for vast spans of the plot. Doctorow is at pains to create a core group for Marcus only to have them all removed from the story by the halfway point and then haphazardly mentioned in a rushed ending.
Marcus was also a bit annoying as a narrator--particularly when in the company of his girlfriend. Realistic depictions of teens aside, I was hoping for a bit more from characters (teen or otherwise) in a novel which is grounded in such extraordinary circumstances.
Black and White versus the Continuum September 2, 2009
Walt Eddy (Layton, Utah)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Making Expression Less Taxing: A Freelancer's Tax ResourceIf you haven't read Cory Doctorow's novel, LITTLE BROTHER, you should. It's fast-paced, entertaining --- as in, gauged for those with mild to serious attention deficit disorder --- and it tries to address at least one serious topic: the right to privacy in the United States. As far as a good read over against a good watch, it reminds me of an episode --- perhaps several episodes --- of the television series 24 with Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland). It has that verve, that sense of impending disaster, and that sense of this is right and that is wrong.
On the other hand, it doesn't seem to have much gray matter (double entendre intended), including the necessity to negotiate or compromise very much of anything or to see issues along continuums. Of course, to do so would slow things down and make them more cumbersome to read. You would really have to think then, to sort things out as you read along. As it stands, you have to do that after you complete the book, which is okay, but....
The book seems... immature, like both its protagonist, Marcus Yallow, a seventeen-year-old who wants to be a man, but he is never more than halfway there, and its antagonist, the Division of Homeland Security, which Doctorow has acting like a two-year-old most of the time. The setting is the California Bay Area --- mostly San Francisco and the East Bay. The time period is contemporary and into the immediate future, in the aftermath of 9/11 and after President George W. Bush and his cohorts, especially Dick Cheney, have established fear as an element of public policy through Congress's enactment of the Patriot Act. Marcus is a nerd of the first class order, living out his dream as the hero in gaming communities and in all things digital, especially in the aftermath of a terrorist attack, the kind that pisses himself in a crisis and chooses a girlfriend for sex rather than good judgment and brains. A lot like some teenagers, but not all.
Did I enjoy the read? I did. Will I read more Doctorow? Probably. What would I hope for in something new? A little more depth, a little more exploration, a little more analysis of the complexities of issues rather than some icky black and white nonsense. On the other hand, that might slow things and make for a less intense experience. Oh well. Like Umberto Echo says, the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 140
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