|  | Author: Cory Doctorow
Publisher: Tor Teen
List Price: $17.95
Buy Used: $5.93
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Seller: seattlegoodwill
Rating:  142 reviews
Sales Rank: 9367
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
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
Condition: May have some shelf wear. This item is only available for purchase online and is not available in the Goodwill store. This item is being offered by Goodwill, a non-profit organization. All funds raised are used to support the Goodwill which provides quality, effective employment training and basic education to individuals experiencing significant barriers to economic opportunity. Because Jobs Change Lives. Proceeds from the sale of these goods and financial donations from the community make it possible for us to operate our free job training programs. Your donations and purchases help support these important programs and make the community a better place for all of us.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 136-140 of 142
 Excellent May 6, 2008
Chris K. Stephens
5 out of 9 found this review helpful
This book should be required reading for all Americans. If only to spark more lively debates about the nature of government and the implicit responsibilities of citizens.
Like many others, I could not put this book down once I started. This book reminded me a lot of V for Vendetta which is one of my all time favorite movies.
 Good read, but a bit awkward May 6, 2008
heavyd (New Haven, CT)
17 out of 23 found this review helpful
I enjoyed the book for the most part. It features a clever plot and fairly engaging characters. I also appreciate Cory licensing this under CC.
Nonetheless, I was somewhat disappointed. The bad guys are one-dimensional caricatures, and even some of the characters who experience reversals along the way just shift from one extreme to another. Neither are the good guys immune to engaging in awkward, expository debate as the cliches bounce back and forth. These contrivances may be aimed at a different audience, but I found myself somewhat annoyed. And I realize it's a nit-pick, but it also puts me off to see kids supposedly derived from California using words like "piccies" and ducking into the "toilet."
Overall, a fun read, but I honestly just couldn't get into it the way I had hoped.
Richie's Picks: LITTLE BROTHER May 5, 2008
Richie Partington (Sebastopol, CA United States)
14 out of 20 found this review helpful
"There's something really liberating about having some corner of your life that's yours, that no one gets to see except you. It's a little like nudity or taking a dump. Everyone gets naked every once in a while. Everyone has to squat on the toilet. There's nothing shameful, deviant or weird about either of them. But what if I decreed that from now on, every time you went to evacuate some solid waste, you'd have to do it in a glass room perched in the middle of Times Square, and you'd be buck naked?
"Even if you've got nothing wrong or weird with your body -- and how many of us can say that? -- you'd have to be pretty strange to like that idea. Most of us would run screaming. Most of us would hold it in until we exploded.
"It's not about doing something shameful. It's about doing something private. It's about your life belonging to you.
"They were taking that from me, piece by piece. As I walked back to my cell, that feeling of deserving it came back to me. I'd broken a lot of rules all my life and I'd gotten away with it, by and large. Maybe this was justice. Maybe this was my past coming back to me. After all, I had been where I was because I'd snuck out of school."
San Francisco techno-geek teen Marcus Yallow (aka "w1n5t0n") and his three friends find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. Having all snuck out of their respective schools to get a head start on tracking down the latest clue in their favorite Alternative Reality Game -- Harajuku Fun Madness -- for which they are teammates, they are picked up by the Department of Homeland Security in the immediate aftermath of the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history, transported to a secret prison, and kept in isolation:
"'Am I under arrest?'
"'You're going to have to be more cooperative, Marcus, starting right now.' She didn't say, 'or else,' but it was implied.
"'I would like to contact an attorney,' I said. 'I would like to know what I've been charged with. I'd like to see some form of identification from both of you.'
"The two agents exchanged looks.
"I think you should really reconsider your approach to this situation,' severe haircut lady said. 'I think you should do that right now. We found a number of suspicious devices on your person. We found you and your confederates near the site of the worst terrorist attack this country has ever seen. Put those two facts together and things don't look very good for you, Marcus. You can cooperate, or you can be very, very sorry. Now what is this for?'
"'You think I'm a terrorist? I'm seventeen years old!'
"'Just the right age -- Al Qaeda loves recruiting impressionable, idealistic kids. We googled you, you know. You've posted a lot of very ugly stuff on the public Internet.
"'I would like to speak to an attorney,' I said.
"Severe haircut lady looked at me like I was a bug. 'You're under the mistaken impression that you've been picked up by the police for a crime. You need to get past that. You are being detained as a potential enemy combatant by the government of the United States. If I were you. I'd be thinking very hard about how to convince us that you are not an enemy combatant. Very hard. Because there are dark holes that enemy combatants can disappear into, very deep dark holes, holes where you can just vanish. Forever. Are you listening to me young man? I want you to unlock this phone and then decrypt the files in its memory. I want you to account for yourself: why were you out on the street? What do you know about the attack on this city?'
"'I'm not going to unlock my phone for you,' I said, indignant. My phone's memory has all kinds of private stuff on it: photos, emails, little hacks and mods I'd installed. 'That's private stuff.'
"'What have you got to hide?'
"'I've got the right to my privacy,' I said. 'And I want to speak to an attorney.'
"'This is your last chance, kid. Honest people don't have anything to hide.'
"'I want to speak to an attorney.' My parents would pay for it. All the FAQs on getting arrested were clear on this point. Just keep asking to see an attorney, no matter what they say or do. There's no good that comes of talking to the cops without your lawyer present. Those two said they weren't cops, but if this wasn't an arrest, what was it?
"In hindsight, maybe I should have unlocked my phone for them."
Marcus is eventually released, but it is made quite clear to him that he will be picked up and will disappear for good if he says a word to anyone at all about where he has been or what he has been through. Marcus -- who has paid attention during his American government classes -- decides that the Bill of Rights should not be optional and that he must use his techno-talents to anonymously mobilize his fellow teenagers in order to take on the out-of-control U.S. government.
LITTLE BROTHER is an incredibly smart, unbelievably tense thriller. While reading its 365 pages, there was not a single instance when I knew what was going to happen next.
What is most scary about the story is that it is set in the very-near future and that so many of the tech tools, hacks, and mods that Marcus Yallow utilizes or decries are for real. (I googled many of them and, sure enough, there they were!) If you are not familiar with author Cory Doctorow, he has long been involved with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and is an editor at BoingBoing. This guy knows technology and related privacy issues like nobody's business.
Given the unrelenting power of this story and considering that we are at a time in our history when our elected representatives are debating the right of the President to circumvent the requirements of obtaining a court order in order to spy on large numbers of American citizens -- aka ME and YOU -- this is surely going to be one of the ultimate must have/must read teen books of 2008.
"Don't trust anyone over thirty." -- Jerry Rubin
Back in 1971, my adolescent sensibilities were rocked off of their foundations by my exposure to PICTURES AT A PROSECUTION: DRAWINGS AND TEXTS FROM THE CHICAGO CONSPIRACY TRIAL by Jules Feiffer. You can bet your Xbox that there are going to be teens today who will grow up and think back to the moment when someone hooked them up with Cory Doctorow's ground-breaking LITTLE BROTHER.
A plausible near future tale of techno-geek rebellion May 2, 2008
Jvstin (Circle Pines, MN United States)
35 out of 42 found this review helpful
Scott Westerfeld gives Doctorow's latest novel a blurb of "A rousing tales of techno-geek rebellion."
I was kindly given an Advance Reader's Copy by the unparalleled force known as Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and now in return, its time for me to talk about the novel.
Doctorow is more known these days for his often controversial and definitely iconcolastic positions on matters technological. Editor at Boing Boing, crusader against the excesses of Digital Rights Management...Doctorow definitely doesn't keep his head down.
I haven't actually read any novel-length fiction of his until now, and I am glad that I did, even if I am not the intended demographic of the novel.
Little Brother is set around 2010, in a US which has had a Republican return to the White House in the 2008 elections. The story centers around Marcus Yallow, whose original screenname of w1inst0n and the title of the book gave me immediate "spidey senses" of where this novel was going. We get a primer on Marcus' carefree life, and a lot of infodumping on technology--enough that the novel felt a bit like a throwback to SF novels of yore which would do the "as you know, bob" approach to science fiction.
Marcus' SF becomes the target of a terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11, and as he and his friends are cutting school as part of an alternate reality game, they are caught in the DHS dragnet. His anarchic and rebellious attitude do him no good, and he spends a short period in a "Gitmo by the Bay".
Once released (and tellingly, one of his friends is *not*), Marcus becomes even more radicalized by the experience, enough that he is willing to challenge the DHS when San Francisco is put into a lockdown that would be the wet masturbatory dream of authoritarians everywhere.
And therein lies the tale.
Little Brother is written in first person, and so we get everything filtered through Marcus' perceptions, prejudices, attitudes and experience. While I suspect that Marcus' opinions may be very close to Doctorow's (although that's not guaranteed; I wouldn't make the assumption that authorial voice always equals protagonist voice), my meta-knowledge of Doctorow suggests that Marcus' radicalization and voice came very naturally to the author.
Too, aside from the infodumps which slow down the book here and there, the novel sounds like a YA novel. The teenage protagonists sounded, to my ear, like teenagers. They are real characters in a near future world that readers in the same age group can identify with.
I think Doctorow softpedals the confrontations between the teenagers and the security forces a little bit, having them result in mostly non violent confrontations. I suppose Doctorow did load the dice a little bit--a couple of shooting deaths at the hands of the DHS would have destroyed Marcus' movement, and would have turned the book into a parallel, rather than a counterpoint, to 1984. This book doesn't end completely happily...but Marcus makes a difference.
It's a very good book, whatever you think of its politics and opinions, and it fits well as a gateway book. This is the sort of YA science fiction that could, and should, and must bring new readers into the graying genre of SF. And for the rest of us, too, its an indictment of the dangers of security theater, and security which does not make us any safer.
I enjoyed it and commend it to the rest of you.
Cory's best stuff yet May 2, 2008
Ken Kennedy
10 out of 11 found this review helpful
"Little Brother" takes Orwell's "1984", and updates it ala Stephenson's "Cryptomomicon", while taking me back to the young adult stories I remember and loved like "The Three Investigators".
The near-future plot revolves around a group of high school students and the massive security and civil liberties crackdown that lands on San Francisco after a new "9/11" style attack occurs there. It begins with the teens being mistakenly held for military-style interrogation by the DHS, and does a good job (at a YA appropriate level - explicit, but not violently graphic) of describing the mind manipulation and power games that can be played in these situations.
When they're freed, they discover that the Department of Homeland Security has used the event as an excuse for a massive surveillance crackdown in the Bay area, and they chronicle the resultant affect on civil liberties and free speech. Then they fight back, with all the powers next-gen l33t hacker kids can muster.
It's fun, insightful, timely, and it's Doctorow's best work yet. It's sold as "Young Adult" fiction, so don't look in the SF section, but it's well worth reading by everyone.
Showing reviews 136-140 of 142
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