As a naitive of San Fran I was excited to read this book. But very disappointed by the inaccuracy of some neighborhood stereotypes. I felt like the author was just spewing personal resentment towards the city in explaining the dynamics of various city neighborhoods - most of which I've personally lived in. I also felt that the characters did not embody the neighborhoods they lived in. If you are going to brow-beat a description of a place, at least have the characters represent their hoods properly.

Aside from that....the story was very interseting too bad the writing itself was mediocre. The under development of characters, the lack of appeal to Marcus was a great disappointment. You want to like the kid, you want to see him win but the author gave you no real reason to care. *SPOILER* When the kids are released from Gitmo-by-the-bay they casually share a meal at a curbside restaurant in North Beach??? WTF? Marcus talks about getting even right from the jump, then acts completely paranoid when faced with the chance to do so. Plus the "torture" really wasn't anything to keep you up at night. Any 4 year old can tell you that pissing your pants isn't really that big a deal. I wish the author was a bit more creative with the events that took place during the imprisonment.

As another review mentioned, the story is very black and white and you can see the plot coming from a mile away. I often wondered how this guy was even published. He must have an awesome web of trust that knows some people that know some people. Making the hip reporter from the Guardian didn't hurt either.

As many other reviewers, I finished the book in one sitting. It's an easy and captivating read, partly because it is so close to home, and partly because you could easily construct this story in the real life - think Orwell's "1984" combined with Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game", but set today in the city of San Francisco.

The book is set within a context of a recent terrorist attack on SF and the consequent DHS (Department of Homeland Security) lockdown of the city. The lead character, Marcus or M1k3y stands up to the imposed regime and fights back with technology: jamming and reprogramming RFID readers, organizing flash mobs through TOR network, and so on.

However, while the story is sci-fi, the technology is not. In fact, everything that Cory Doctrow mentions in the book already exists in the wild. For that reason alone, this book can serve as a great eye-opener to many technical and non-technical individuals interested in the security of their identity and their privacy (both online and offline).

Pass it around your family, get one of your friends. Great read.

I had a hard time putting this book down. I found it suspenseful, funny and just a lot of fun.

I also found the points made to be quite thought provoking. The author definitely has a point of view but it's well integrated in this all-too-possible story.

Little Brother is a near future science fiction novel that describes an Orewellian (hence the title) situation that arises after a terrorist attack on San Francisco and the teenagers that use technology to fight back against a government intent on stealing their freedom.

This is a country that was founded by a bunch of rebels who didn't like the idea of people taking away their freedom, and too often people forget that. We are way too complacent when it comes to the government meddling in our affairs. Young people should read this book, not just because it is a good book with some wonderfully real and non-cookie cutter characters, but because it also has an important message. Of course, maybe the kids are not the ones we need to worry about. Maybe it's the grown-ups who need to be reminded of what it means to be free, and why we shouldn't let anyone, but especially our government, start messing around with our freedom.

Having a point to make is all good and well in an essay or a speech, but when you present it in the form of a novel you should include a somewhat believable and entertaining story line.
The concern over our lose of liberty is real, and the counter terrorist measures being taken are really much more effective at curtailing our freedoms than at controlling terrorists; but a boring book is still a boring book.

The book raises several interesting issues: how much freedom are you willing to sacrifice for the sake of your security? when does civil discontent become terrorism? what if department of national security is more dangerous than any terrorist group? These are very important questions for young adults to ask themselves. The subject matter definitely makes this book a very compelling read.

There are many things I like about this book. Cory Doctorow creates a very convincing atmosphere of fear and hysteria in near future San Francisco after a terrorist attack. The journey into the world of techno-geek teenagers filled with computer games, role-playing, and hacking, is a fascinating one. The book is action-packed and never boring.

On a negative side, my major complaint is about the quality of writing. I think it is a bit too simplistic and lacks depth. All characters are rather superficial and poorly developed. At the end of the day, I don't really think I know any of them well enough to care about them. This includes Marcus.

Nevertheless, it is an important book and I would recommend it to anyone interested in technology and domestic terrorism policies.

Cory Doctorow's "Little Brother" has won the 2009 Campbell Award for "Best Science Fiction Novel of the Year" (sharing the award with Ian MacLeod's "Song of Time").

I was really looking forward to reading this book. I love young adult literature and this looked like a great novel from the reviews I read. However, I was completely disappointed.

First, Marcus was just an unlikable character. He was pompous and rude. It's obvious he was a smart guy but why did he feel the need to flaunt it CONSTANTLY. Also, from the cover and from the start of the book it looked like a story about three friends who suffered together and then worked together to do something positive because of their shared experience. However, as soon as Van and Julu disagreed with Marcus he dropped them completely. I mean just because they didn't agree with him he couldn't even talk to them? I kept hoping they would come back but Marcus became so involved in Ange and Xnet that his friendships with Van, Julu, and even Daryl were dropped for most of the book. That really bothered me. He only went to them when he needed them and had nobody else to turn too. That seems like a bit of a user to me.

Also, I've never read a book that was so black and white. There was not a bit of grey in the whole story. You either despised the government and plot against them (good) or sympathize with the government and do everything in your power to thwart freedom (bad). I definitely lean toward the left politically but I don't think our government and the people who support conservative candidates are evil and dumb. Before people start ranting I KNOW that our country has tortured people, made security check points in airports more extensive, etc... and I might not agree with these decisions, but I also feel that our country has done good things too. Most Americans are considered moderate politically and I just don't feel like this novel speaks to anyone other than extreme liberals that really enjoy ranting about how horrible our country is.

To finish, this storyline intrigued me. That is why I bought the book. I thought it was going to be something like V for Vendetta where each character has flaws and no side is perfect. Every character makes mistakes but in the end the decision for freedom is put into the hands of the people. Nothing in V was black or white and their were so many layers of why events were happening. It was so powerful. However, Little Brother was not that. It was a political rant from a guy that is blind from hate that he spews it throughout the whole book and makes the storyline suffer for it.

This book was named the best book of the year from my library. It is a scarily accurate portrayal of modern day orwellian doctrine. This book I think is geared towards highschool age readers but readers of any age will enjoy this. I couldn't put it down! I also love the remarks at the end by the xbox hacker. Very real and compelling. WORTH THE CASH!

Though I'm well over the demographic age, I found this book to be engaging and satisfying. The ties to current events are obvious; the information on tech and even its mathematical bases was neither too involved nor intrusive -- in fact, it was welcome information. I'd like to see a copy in the hands of every teen with an interest in computers, games, or coding, in hopes they'll take on board the broad issues of privacy, security, and freedom. And I'd like a *lot* of adults to read it, as well -- first, because it's an enjoyable read; second, to remind them of their own youthful enthusiasms; and third, to awaken them to some serious Constitutional issues that need to be kept in mind daily.

This book is compelling and provocative. You don't need to be a science fiction fan, all the technology in this book exists today. Little Brother is very much about today, or the very near future. It may quickly become dated, but today it is right on top of some very important issues we should all be thinking about.

I'd like to recommend it for young people, but I just can't. There are two lines that, as an adult, I find cute, sweet and nostalgic, but just cross over the line and are too graphic for young teens.

If you're over 16 this is a must read. When my wife and our friends are done reading my copy I'll be giving it to our county library. I think it is that important.

This book is excellent.

The title Little Brother with it's reference to Orwell's 1984 is certainly worthy. The book takes the concepts set forth in 1984 adds a very real and modern touch to them and then strips it back to something far closer to home. Whilst it will never be the chillingly brilliant book 1984 was it does allow a younger audience to think about these very serious and real issues that societies all around the world are facing more and more in normal day to day life.

My only advice to anyone over 20 thinking about reading this book is remember the target audience. This is a book aimed at young adults (mid teens!) which means you'll get lots of the usual hormone filled, child's perspective on issues. Not to say that this isn't relevant, far from it, just don't expect to instantly relate to the characters without thinking back to your youth.

This is an incredible book, and you should certainly purchase it. The book literally left me with chills when I finished.

It is well written and fast-paced, despite the fact that it explores complex themes and contains interesting information about cryptography and computer science.

I can see reading this when younger, and being compelled to a different career path than the one I chose. Who knows, perhaps I will still change paths?!

I enjoyed this book much more than I expected to, as it isn't the usual genre I read but this was a selection for our book club. I was engaged by the character of Marcus and his actions were easy to understand given what happened to him.
The computer hacking and technology creations were well explained and, for a person with no computer programming abilities, I was able to keep up with what Marcus was doing even if I couldn't tell you exactly how he was doing it.
The contrast between his parents feelings and his about the events that were happening around them and Marcus understanding of what his imprisonment had done to them, particularly his father and how that motivated his actions was well done. Marcus wasn't a self-centered teenager but was thinking of others beside himself.
I don't want to say too much and give spoilers but if you are looking for a thought-provoking read, outside of the usual storylines, you're sure to enjoy this book.

Doctorow had all the right ideas in writing this book. Through his fictionalized account of a terrorist attack on San Francisco's Bay Bridge and BART system, and the resultant crackdown on the city by the Department of Homeland Security, Doctorow tries to paint a picture of what can happen when the zeal for security bests protection for civil liberties.

Unfortunately, his excellent point is drowned out by his heavy-handed sermonizing. Anyone reading this book will probably already understand the danger of protecting America by taking away civil liberties, so Doctorow is preaching to the choir to begin with. To hammer in his message so emphatically is somewhat insulting to his readers' intelligence. More subtlety would have made this both a better book as well as a more effective one.

Doctorow's book looks at a possible future in which the excesses of "enhanced interrogations" are visited upon US citizens by the Department of Homeland Security after a terror attack. The book follows a precocious 17-year-old and his friends who are caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.

While the book makes villains out of America's right wing as perpetrators of making a terrorist attack serve as an excuse to take over, I wonder if Doctorow might change his tune now that we have a White House Chief of Staff who's said that a crisis must not be wasted?

Despite my political misgivings, I enjoyed the book and concur with Doctorow's observations regarding how security measures almost always inconvenience the innocent and miss the guilty.

This is a good book to encourage thoughtful discussions about the differences between secrecy and privacy or freedom and liberty. It is, though, a bit too black and white, too simplistic in its viewpoint. Of course, teenagers tend to be simplistic in their worldview, it comes from their lack of life experience. The frequent asides to explain the geeky stuff were interesting, even fascinating, but ultimately too distracting from the story. The use of every modern "evil despot" trope was too much. It became a child's story of ever escalating horrors and lost its effectiveness. A good cautionary tale does not serve up every evil on the same plate. That said, I think the book is quite enjoyable as a near future thriller. As an aside, I found the VampMob charming and funny.

While I enjoyed the book immensely and now understand the effusive praise from such people as Neil Gaiman, I found myself wishing it hadn't been written as YA.

Many people seem to think YA means "featuring a young protagonist." But there are books aplenty - from "Dune" to "Catcher in the Rye" - with young protagonists that aren't, in any real sense, YA books.

The problem with "Little Brother" is that these uber-hip, techno-savvy, sexually adventurous kids use "expletives" like "screw" and "friggin'." Sorry. No way would they use such dork-isms. Kip in "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel" was a less worldly kid of the '50s who might have gotten away with "gollies" - these guys simply do not, and it makes them considerably less real than they might otherwise have been.

Another complaint: A surprising number of expository lumps. Our narrator frequently "turns to the camera" to explain this concept or that. The stuff is interesting, and certainly illuminating to a non-techie reader like me, but it violates a basic rule of good writing, IMO.

Still, it's a good book. A fine story with a powerful message.

It's George Bush's 3rd term, and nobody in the book thinks this is remarkable. Karl Rove is conspiring with the head of Homeland Security to facilitate al Qaeda attacks on the US, in order to pass another round of PATRIOT Acts. Fortunately, Karl Rove and his army of torture-murderers are dumber than a group of teenagers who specialize in skipping school to play alternate-reality games.

If you think that the premise of this novel is plausible, there is something wrong with you, not just wrong with you as a person, but wrong with you in the head. Seek professional medical help; they're doing remarkable things for paranoid schizophrenia these days. Because no sane person believes that this is even vaguely possible, let alone unremarkable to claim, except the kind of cartoon straw-men liberals who only exist in the fantasies of Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage. Well, them, and apparently Cory Doctorow, and everybody else who recommend this ugly piece of 9/11 revisionism. I weep for my country.

Little Brother was blurbed by the likes of Neil Gaiman and Scott Westerfeld. It's appeared on multiple best books of 2008 lists, received a ton of great reviews and is a contender for The Hugo Award for best novel.



Marcus, a seventeen year-old hacker, is skipping school with three of his friends when Bay Bridge is blown up. In the chaos, he and his friends are mistaken for perpetrators and captured by the police. They are taken to an unknown location where they are interrogated for days. When they're finally released, Marcus is shocked to discover the methods police use to "prevent terrorism" (which often include taken away citizens' rights).


He refuses to take this lying down-ultimately, deciding to take the problem into his own hands. He's a smart, technologically aware teen and soon he's found himself leading a following of people, devoted to exposing the government's misdemeanors.






At first, I found the book engaging, informative (but still interesting) and hard to put down. However, subtle would not be the best word to describe the book. It's filled with paragraphs explaining technology (such as LARPing, gait-recognition software, etc.) and paragraphs that almost seem to lecture you. On one hand, I knew very little about the technology Marcus described and the way it was presented was easy to understand and in some cases, absolutely fascinating. But, on the other hand, those moments tended to take me out of the story. Sometimes I felt as if the book sacrificed a better-developed plotline and characters for the message.




Still, the novel's an excellent way to spark a discussion-the exact discussion that needs to be had at a point where we all rely on technology so much (without fully understanding it) and how easy it would be for our rights to be taken away.


Little Brother is also a coming-of-age novel. By the end of the novel, Marcus had made a lot of mistakes (and learned from them..most of the time), fallen in love and grown up. He's a smart, believable character just like the novel (in fact, the novel's premise is frighteningly realistic). Despite my problems with the book, I would still recommend reading it

I'm 45, and I couldn't put down my Kindle for three days while reading this one. It's readily available for Kindle for free, just not from Amazon, but they got their money when I had to buy a dead-tree version to give to my friends who I knew would love it. It's fast-paced, detailed, and with compelling sympathetic characters.

Little Brother
I had so much fun reading this book and would recommend it to anyone. Cory Doctorow has written a very compelling and fast read that will appeal to anyone with a myspace page or Facebook account. Video gamers, bloggers, and parents will have a lot to ponder as they read this book. I bought a copy for big brother and plan on reading it again myself.

I grew up different than most everyone around me. Whether nature or nurture shaped me more, I can't say, but my grandfather was an electrical engineer, my father is a network engineer, and I am a security engineer. If you had a kid in school who always dressed just a little bit oddly, read books about math and science for fun, could do things with computers and electronics that the other kids would have never even imagined, and constantly got in trouble for being bored in class but managed to get good grades anyway... well, me and that kid would have been great friends for having so much in common.

Among this geek subculture, we tend to hold certain beliefs in common. Geeks usually have a strong libertarian streak of one sort or another, possibly due to the fact that we just want society to let us be different and explore the world our own way. And, like some other subcultures, we critically examine (in the best sense of that phrase) what people tell us and how things work. We never left behind that childhood phase of asking "why?" over and over and over. We wear T-shirts with obscure technical jokes and argue about what the word "hacker" really means.

We can trace back our "subcultural roots" for centuries. Stephen Hawking and Richard Feynman and Alan Turing and Nikolai Tesla and Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage and Benjamin Franklin... all the way (at least) to Leonardo da Vinci. And my generation keeps the flame alive in its own unique way, particularly with the genesis of Net culture. Cory Doctorow, author of Little Brother, has established himself as one of the thought leaders of this subculture, or at least someone who conforms to our little brand of non-conformity and has enough of a soapbox to champion many of the causes dear to our hearts. Find an intersection between social justice and copyleft and mathematics, and he will be chronicling and championing it.

Little Brother represents Doctorow's homage to 1984 and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, boiled down to a novel aimed squarely at teenagers. I can't really call this "science fiction"; it's more of a libertarian thriller that gets listed in the YA section at the bookstore. He runs through a (fictional) terrorist attack on San Francisco and the ensuing response by the Department of Homeland Security. Make no mistake, Little Brother says as much about politics as it does about technology. I suspect Doctorow would argue that the two have grown into each other at this point, and he'd do so convincingly. Conservatives reading this book may wince at some of the characterizations found in it, as the book openly espouses a particular sort of progressive politics centered around San Francisco.

The novel doesn't quite reach the heights of the novels and writers mentioned above, and that's a shame. Doctorow could have treated some of the antagonists in the novel with a bit more nuance, or at least presented the other side of the argument with a little more understanding, less polemically. In places, the exposition gets a little thick, partly due to his desire to explain the real-life technical details and partly so that he can make out the bad guys as really bad. He takes a few shots at minority religions, including this reviewer's, and glosses over the racial implications and complexities of the Global War on Terror and DHS. These details detract from the novel, moving it from a tale of the struggle for freedom backed up by technology to a propaganda piece for a particular brand of techno-libertarian progressive white politics.

They don't do so, however, to the degree that the novel loses all value. Doctorow has a lot to say about these things, and so not only should those of us who belong to the geek / hacker subculture read this book, and maybe buy a copy for a smart 15-year-old, but maybe for an intelligent but staid person who just doesn't quite understand why kids these days can't just listen and respectfully accept what authority figures tell them.

This novel of a teenage boy in his battle against Homeland Security has its good moments where I was engaged. But in between those moments, the preaching was repetitious and boring, and the pace a bit slow. I heard the audio-book, and the reader was very good. The beginning was great, following a rebellious high-schooler who felt that the school administration was interfering with his privacy. And then, behold, terrorists strike his home city of San Francisco, and his fight against prying authority turns against a more invasive and evil Homeland Security. Long stretches of teaching us about high tech gizmos and the same diatribes against a loss of freedom were too much for me. I was hoping that this book might probe the fine line between freedom and security. Instead, the "security people" are all bad and the teen rebels are all good. I could live with this unrealistic black-and-white portrayal if the story were better. Overall, I was disappointed with this novel.

Marcus is your typical 17 year old techno geek. He can hack into almost anything and has built multiple computers by himself. When him and his friends skip the final hours of school they become part of the biggest terrorist attack the States has ever seen. No, they didn't do anything, they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Department of Homeland Security, or the DHS, has apprehended both Marcus and his friends and taken them to a secret prison and continues to interogate and semi-torture them for days on end. When Marcus is finally released he is released alone. Hoping for the best he returns to find his parents in a mad state because they thought he was dead and can't even bring himself to tell them of his experience with the DHS. Then when Marcus realizes that Darryl, his best friend who was injured before the DHS took him, hasn't returned and the city has turned into one big security check point he vows to get even and get everyone's freedom back. This starts a whole chain of events which Marcus becomes the leader of. From creating a spy proof internet hubb to jamming the tracking system. Will Marcus and his followers be able to bring the DHS down and return freedom to the people of San Francisco, or will he be shipped out by the DHS never to be heard from again?

This was definitely an interesting and thought provoking book. I really wanted to love it because it totally tunes in to the reader's inner geek, but it just didn't absorb me like I thought it would. It was easy to walk away from and I didn't find myself eager to sit down and read it. The potential for a great story was definitely there, but at times it was majorly confusing. Especially when Marcus went on to explain all of these technological processes that I couldn't even begin to imagine. During these parts of the book I felt myself skimming through them because I couldn't even begin to wrap my head around what was going on. Other than that though I loved the quirckiness of the characters. I felt like they were all original and I hadn't met them before in some previous book. I think my favorite part of the whole book was the author's ability to make me feel such deep dislike for the DHS. At the end I felt myself getting so worked up and angry about the way the DHS was treating people. There were many times that I felt like throwing the book down and storming off, but then everything would be okay. The ending was definitely the best part of the book and definitely redeemed it in many ways. Overall I liked this book and would recommend it for both guys and girls, but think that guys would probably get more out of it.

Most Americans don't realize that there are laws on the books right now (April 2009) that allow the president to declare any person, citizen or non-citizen, an "enemy combatant" and detain them without trail. Enemy combatants are not covered by the Geneva Convention, according to the last administration. That's an outrage and our current administration doesn't do things that way, but what will the next one think, or the one after that?
Wake up, people! Until the national security act of 2006 is repealed, we're in danger. Sure Obama's in office now, but the opposition is passionately ideological, hate-filled, and highly propagandized (fox news is not a joke). I fear that we're in the same position that Germany was in between the wars, and our Nazis are just waiting to take our country to hell. If our reaction is anything like it has been for the last 8 years, we'll all be good Americans and go along with the atrocities until the world puts a stop to it.

That's why this book is so important, kids. - Thank you, Corey -

My previous 3 paragraphs are probably the exact wrong approach to fixing this problem. Corey's book is exactly the right approach.

Plus congrats, Corey, on the writing, characters, plotting, pacing, etc. Oh and all the awesome hacking and LARPing details. Excellent excellent work. I cared about those characters and I loved the father's trajectory; it was an eye opener to have the Mother explain him so well. I think people like the father are wrong, but I also used to think they were stupid and evil.

THANKS AGAIN, MAN. This being-Cassandra thing was tired.

Hey Readers: It's a really really exciting read. I got choked up and choked with rage a couple of times. It was very playful, It had fascinating diversions.

As a hysterical librarian for freedom I looked forward to reading a book about a teenagers resistance to the Fascist and draconian actions of the Department of Homeland Security. I mainly read this book because I try to read all the Hugo nominated novels. Also I had heard Cory Doctorow speak at a science fiction con and his expertise on copyright and other information issues was more informative than anything I had heard at a library convention.

The novel is classified as a Young Adult novel but I would recommend it for anyone from a mature child who can understand the concepts to any adult who is interested in keep his or her freedom. Check out www.eff.org and you will see that the Obama administration has gone further than the Bush administration in allowing some spying.

All this and more is tied together in this book. I would call it a manual of resistance. The novel actually uses the plot to explain how security technologies work and why despite all the security measures, we should not feel safer. Also it explains the mathematics of hunting down terrorists. You may find that the most interesting, in as much, the system is almost guaranteed by its bad design to fail in actually finding a real terrorist. It is more likely to snag the ordinary citizen than the Al Qada operative.

I had always thought of hackers as criminals. I had associated them with the criminals who are after your credit card information. In actuality the criminals are using tactics invented by hackers to break into and also to test security systems. The hackers are more akin to the tinkerers who invented much of the technology we enjoy today. I remember years ago when a student at a US university broke a supposedly uncrackable security system in less then 10 years ago. These are the type of people depicted in this novel.

The novel is not a series of explanations but is a well told tale with interesting characters. The protagonists are all friends who attend high school in San Francisco. There is a lot of humor, some of which had me laughing out loud. You will be introduced to such things as LARPs (Live Action Role Playing) which are essentially live action Dungeons and Dragons games, flash mobs, though the term is not used in the novel, Arfids, RFD chips which are now in many things and are presently used mostly for inventory control.

There are also parts that will move you to tears. The main character's absolute dedication to freedom, Constitutional freedom, not anarchy is very moving.

Make sure you read the epilogues to the book. They encourage further reading.

I read this book for an English course on Internet & Society. I didn't expect to enjoy it as much as I did. I literally just finished it, reading to the last page and finding myself wishing there was more to learn. The internet has always fascinated me, and this book rekindled my interest in technology in general. It's well written and very accurate. Using technology as we know it today to show how "little brother" can fight "big brother" is very engaging for readers. I feel like I've achieved knowledge on many different levels after reading Doctorow's "Little Brother" and I recommend it to people of all ages and backgrounds.

I'm inspired to read and learn more about the internet and technology from this book!

I really enojoyed reading this book! It was fun and fast and I didn't want to put it down. Reading about all the technological stuff going on, and ultimately finding out that this technology is real was amazing! It really makes you question what's going on in the world today.

A great book. Prepare to THINK about how the world is today. Teens and young people will love it, and adults (me included) will yearn for the days when they were young and maybe a little nit reckless.

Highly recommended for anyone who is okay with a little bit of slightly obscene language and moderate sexuality.

I think most of us know that "the world has changed". I find myself alternately ticked off and overly understanding about some of the 'security' things that go on today. For this book, I found myself being outraged at times and thinking "well, maybe I can understand that". This book is set in the not so distant future after terrorists have attacked San Fransisco. The DHS goes a little (okay, a lot) crazy and the main character decides to get a little revenge. There's a lot of little online geek references that made me smile.

The book itself is pretty good. The story was entertaining enough to keep my interest and keep me turning the pages, but it also made me think. If we're willing to give up THIS particular freedom, who's to say we won't be willing to give a larger freedom in a few years? Are we THAT driven by fear?

The best part of this book is that it's licensed under the Creative Commons. What does that mean? You can download it for free from the author's site - (I downloaded the .prc file and sent it to my Kindle to read). Okay, a really good book for FREE? How can you beat that? I think I'm still going to pick up the physical book here at Amazon to share though. It was a super interesting read.

A must read.

"Little Brother" shows the interest of how technology can affect people. The book is full of drama, action, and lots of surprise. I would suggest that anyone interested in technology would definetly like to buy the book.

If this book had been written with the skill and eloquence of Andrew Huang's Afterword at the close of the story, I would have given this four our five stars. The story is highly imaginative and provocative, but lacked polish.

So well written, awesome story and a really good read for everyone. Makes you think.

This is a great book for anyone looking for hope in the current age of "loosing personal freedom thanks to homeland security."

It made me mad, hopeful and amazed at the possibilities of learning how to hack systems.

Little Brother is an outstanding Young Adult novel playing on the idea of "big brother" from the classic 1984.
The main character, Marcus is like any other teen. The Bush era of the Patriot Act and the violation of individual freedoms is upon him in the form of a school-issued laptop that is locked down and used as a tracking device of every move the students make. The school is becoming a prison as cameras are installed in the classrooms and paranoia has run amok in San Francisco. Marcus is basically a hacker who is playing a game against other hackers when the Bay Bridge is bombed and he is found in the wrong place at the wrong time.

He is imprisoned and makes the decision that when he gets out he will use all of his hacking skills to get payback against the government. If you are a rebel, this book is a great read. If you know anything about technology, this book is a great read. If you have ever felt like the government or schools are getting out of hand with the amount of control, then you will love this book.

Little Brother is suspense-filled novel that is reminiscent of Mission Impossible, the teen version. It is exhilarating, and impossible to put down. Rooting for the little guy, Marcus, and learning how he empowers a whole group of like-minded teens to use the Xnet and subvert the attempts of the Department of Homeland Security through encrypted messages, blogs and jamming technology.

This is a relevant, up-to-date thriller that really makes you think. Loved it!

This is a good book. I would highly recommend it to young adults. I think middle school aged would probably be ideal.

For an adult it is a quick and entertaining read. I would recommend to check out other Doctorow stuff before this one. He has a great website and you can try before you buy pretty much all of his writings.

Cory! How could you let this happen? The quality of the typography in this ebook is HORRIBLE. It looks like CRAP on my Kindle - the pages of your book were obviously scanned in a way that has created broken text forms with weak spots, faded bits, and broken letterforms.

I expected so much more.

I will now attempt to get through the eye-grating visuals to see if the story is any good. Is going to be an uphill battle.

This is a well written, entertaining book on an important topic. I highly recommend it. It's categorized as a teen book, but it will hold the interest of adults as well. I heard about it from the GeekDads blog, read it, my wife read it, and my son is reading it. Speculative fiction is probably the right tag, and not science fiction. While some of the specfic products don't exist, the technology is all here today, as are the problems and shortcomings of that technology. I'll keep this short, because Patrick Shepherd "hyperpat" review says everything I'd want to say, and does it better!

This was a great book. I was unable to put it down. So much of what is written is really happening now. We need to be aware of how much of our private lives are able to be tracked by others. Within the context of fiction, this book does that.

I started the book at 2:00 AM, planning on reading a few chapters to get to sleep (college student here). So much for that. I ended up staying up until 6:00 AM reading the whole thing through. It was just so fascinating and amazingly written and disturbing on a level that's familiar to any American that's thought about the concept of Homeland Security's over-the-top rights.

This is an entertaining story, which makes it a good vehicle with which to introduce the concepts of privacy, cryptography, and security and why they are important in a free society. It gives lots of good information about those topics and has a nice "further reading" section at the end where you can get more information.

The writing, however, is a little clunky and distracts from the story. Part of it seems like the work on a new writer. Part of it seems like the writing suffering for the sake of conveying the factual information; the story tends to pause while the characters explain technical details for the reader's sake.

I'd recommend this book to people interested in security but not very knowledgeable. It's a great book to give to kids so they can start incorporating this stuff into their daily lives. I couldn't stop reading the book and it is pretty breezy.

I loved this book. Your outrage at the new, horrible abuses of government through the Patriot Act will keep you engaged with the book, while the likability of the characters will fuel that engagement. Books about dystopian futures are usually downers, but this book explored governmental abuses, the destruction of privacy, and the unconstitutional torture of American citizens on American soil while still keeping the tone upbeat. The hero, Marcus Yallow, is only 17 years old, and as a result, his idealism and youthful belief in Right winning in the end will have you believing it too, despite your more cynical knowledge that in the real world it probably won't. His optimism keeps the book from becoming hopeless as you read what would otherwise be a doomed struggle against our corrupt government.

I was hooked on this book and read it as quickly over a two-day period as life would allow. It's infectious - you don't want to stop reading it. And the speedy pace makes the reading faster too. I wished it had gone on longer. My only complaint (because otherwise I'm full of praise for this novel), is that there were bits of plot that arose that the reader might have thought were going somewhere, characters introduced whose stories were never explicated (like Charles...what WAS that dude's problem?), and tangents that were dropped before fully forming. Minor plot issues were fudged for the sake of the author's real interest in technology and explaining technology. These explanations were fun enough that you didn't really care that certain other parts of plot were left by the wayside.

This was a fantastic read, especially if you loved the movie Hackers. Except this novel had an important, political point. Read it and find out.

I've been really enjoying dystopian fiction lately, and was very intrigued to see a review of this YA take on the troubling and timely themes posed by 1984 and the other classics in this realm. I picked it up a few weeks ago, and when I started it, found it very difficult to put down. It follows the experience of a high school senior, deeply entrenched in the virtual world, who is accused of conspiracy in a large-scale terrorist attack and undergoes torture and threats by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Upon his release, he finds that his city has become a police state, and decides to fight back the best way he knows how, via technology.

First of all, Doctorow does a fabulous job of pulling you into the story and making you feel like an "in" member of the technological elite that the main character, Marcus "w1n5t0n/M1k3y" clearly belongs to. While I'm pretty tech-savvy, there were many references that would normally go over my head, and Doctorow boils them down to be understandable to the layman. On a related note, I think that this book has one of the best overviews of PGP (Pretty Good Privacy - although it doesn't identify it by name) that I've encountered. So bravo for writing a book that is highly accessible despite a subject matter that is often very intimidating to the general public. I think that for the discussion of privacy and internet security alone, this book should be required reading for today's youth. It's really quite scary when you realize how much of your private life is and/or can easily be tracked.

Secondly, I think that he does a superb job of writing a story of teenage rebellion that is not undermined by that very concept. What I mean by this is that it would be so easy to write off a rebellious teenager "fighting the man" because his favorite activities have been restricted. But this is so much more than a story about rebelling against authority. Marcus revisits the roots of our nation, and reflects on earlier protest movements that swept the country, and ultimately comes to grips with both the severity of his actions, and the importance of them. He recruits adults that he trusts; he takes steps to ensure that his actions and those of his compatriots are, to the greatest extent possible, pacifist, responsible, and impactful; and he fights for the truth and his loved ones even at great personal cost.

I would definitely recommend this to anyone interested in YA fiction, dystopian literature, technology and its uses/abuses, and the relationship between privacy, freedom, and security. It's a great book.

This book had a good plot, but PLENTY of innapropriate content. There were many swear words, and pretty much every kind, including sh-t, d-mn, b-stard, b-tch, motherf-er, p-ss, he-ll, and other derogatory terms. Three sex scenes, condoms mentioned, and some violence where kids are kidnapped and treated wrongly, and a scene of waterboarding (simulated death). I don't recommmend this book to anyone, but if you do read it, people over the age of sixteen.

I loved this book it was just amazing. It showed the importance of the power of the people and the ways that technology affects our life and country. I highly suggest this book to anyone, but especially John Green and Harry Potter fans. It's just amazing

Cory Doctorow's "Little Brother" is a fine thriller, at least until about halfway through. At that point, it turns more and more into the manifesto of a petty criminal.
Marcus, the main character, or "hero" as he would be called in a real thriller, is a high-school hacker who gets roughed up by the Department of Homeland Security. He takes it personally and vows to take on the Man.
I wanted to like the story, and did for quite awhile, but the action faltered as characters engaged in lengthy discussions of the "rights" of citizens to have the privacy to engage in illegal and/or antisocial activities. The cameras and the goons keep infringing on our hero's rights and then the reader gets bored in the middle of the book.
I suppose the book has some more action, and perhaps a rousing ending, and maybe Marcus kisses the girl, but I won't bother to find out.
Doctorow probably thinks he is doing the youth of our country a service by bringing up and wringing his hands about the issues of free speech, liberty and privacy, but he has missed the point entirely.
Liberty, privacy and free speech are curtailed in wartime by Democrats and Republicans alike. The narcissistic acts of a few are sacrificed for the good of the many, and this is called civilization.
There is no "right" to misbehave, cause havoc and generate mayhem. If there was, as is purported by the advocates of Moral Relativism, then nobody could ever be blamed for their behavior, no matter how reprehensible.
In a good and just society, the needs of the larger body politic will always be more important than the perceived needs of the individual egomaniac.

I grabbed this book off the "new" shelf in my public library. I just thought, "Oh, look, a book I haven't read yet." I've read many, many books. This book has turned out to be one of my favorites. I don't know a whole lot about tech stuff, but this was one heck of a story. I stayed up late for several days because I was unable to put this book down. This book showed me what the government could do, if it really wanted to, and that sometimes protesting quietly is the best way to screw them over. I hope that every person who like to read will get their hands on this book. It was absolutely amazing.

This book is an excellent read. If you are not a little worried about how our government has eroded much of the freedoms and rights we take for granted you will be after reading this book.

This book wasn't exactly how I expected it to be, but i still actually enjoyed it a lot. While a little overdone, it was an eye-opener and can give you some perspective. The narrator was good and a worthy character. All in all, this book was pretty good.