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There is a reason why totalitarian governments ban books. The reason is that books can change the world. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and Frederick Douglass' autobiography opened people's eyes to the evils of slavery; Anne Frank's Diary taught us that genocide kills innocent young girls; "To Kill a Mockingbird" showed us that justice isn't always just and that people should be judged by their character rather than the color of their skin; "The Grapes of Wrath" opened our eyes to the plight of migrant far...
Little Brother by Cory Doctorow hits some sensitive themes over and over in a narrative of the sooner rather than later dystopian problems following a post 9/11 terrorist attack on America, this time in San Francisco. Making an obvious tip of the cap to George Orwell, Doctorow begins his story in 2015 with hip, techie teenager Marcus and his exploits trying to avoid problems with his assistant principal. Geeky adolescent shenanigans are quickly interrupted by the attack and the subsequent martia...
Just finished reading the free .pdf version of Cory Doctorow's Little Brother.The writing is not the tightest I have ever read, nor does it even begin to exude elegance, but it does a decent job of keeping you reading.I was incredibly put off by the chapter-start bookstore dedications. It felt like a weird meta sort of pandering. This is what you do when you are relentlessly self-promotional. You tell people you like them, and tell everyone in the world their name and where they "live." The obli...
“It's not about doing something shameful. It's about doing something private. It's about your life belonging to you.” What do you value more - privacy or security? What if the endless security measures lull you into thinking you're safe but are in fact little but an excuse for a tight grip on your, ahem, 'unmentionables' in order to keep you meek and docile? Billed as a young adult book, Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, despite its decidedly young voice and a few overexplanations aimed at chro
What sounds from the description like a fun techno-thriller tinged with lefty politics is instead a didactic bore of a blog entry masquerading as a novel. I agree with the politics of the book; it's the bad writing I have a problem with. It seems Doctorow was so concerned with conveying his Important Message that he forgot that long lectures tend to kill plot momentum. (He also forgot about credible characters and dialogue that sounds like a real human being would actually say it.) A colossal di...
In an attempt to win over a new generation of sci-fi readers, Cory Doctorow's "Little Brother" is marketed as a young adult book. However, adult readers shouldn't worry that Doctorow's book will leave them behind or have them feeling juvenile for reading it."Little Brother" is a mature, contemporary novel that looks at the issue of security in a near-future that doesn't seem too far from today. When San Francisco is attacked by terrorists, seventeen-year-old hacker Marcus and his friends are out...
Seventeen-year-old Marcus studies at a normal school in San Francisco set in the very near future. In this case normal school means total surveillance over the students, complete control over their movement and what they read. Marcus is knowledgeable and rebellious enough to fool the system into giving himself some freedom and privacy. One normal day at school follows another until Marcus and his friends escape it during a break and almost perished in a terrorist attack. The survivors are rounde...
A softened, critical YA work in the tradition of Huxley, Orwell, and Capek, using a modern setting to show the dangers of a surveillance state, misuse of technology, political backlashes, and demagogy.It´s a bit unrealistic that teams of teens should stand a chance against the government of a leading state (view spoiler)[and that one of the mightiest secret services in the world has to torture teens to get information and is unable to avoid getting not just compromised, but even a bit hacked, lo...
Yes, I put a book that was published 8 years ago on my 'Classics' & 'Historical' shelves. It's NOT on my 'Science Fiction' shelf. I read a fair amount of history & SF. This book is very important historically & will be acknowledged as a classic. I've been fiddling with computers since before the Internet was public & have been administering networks for 20 years now. There's nothing in this book that takes the science into the realm of SF.One of my basic duties is dealing with security against b...
Blissfully geeky, great capture of intelligent teenagers in San Francisco, and a very realistic, believable story about what a short distance we are from a complete and utter police state. *grin*Do you trade privacy for security?ETA (1/21/12, just re-read this and did a podcast discussion with SFF Audio)It was harder to read Little Brother the second time around. Not because the book is hard to read, it is the opposite. But because of everything we've just been through in the USA with SOPA and P...
I'm feeling totally weird about feeling so unenthusiastic about this book as everyone I know who has read it seems to have loved it. (Just see that it got another star, this one from the Horn Book.) Seems like I'm the only person on earth who didn't. Ah well. (Cory, if you are reading this stop --- I'm clearly alone in my feelings here. Go read all the reviews of people who like it. Forget about mine.)So anyway, I read it on the plane to ALA and had to really push to finish it. Some of the writi...
So I was required to read this entire book. Over the summer. For a computer science class. And I don't want to be melodramatic, but my enjoyment of that task was on par with Marcus' enjoyment of being waterboarded by the DHS. After suffering through nearly 400 poorly-edited pages, I now understand why people ban books.Pretty much everything I wanted to say about this book has been said before by people more eloquent than I, so I thought I'd let "Little Brother" speak for itself.Here are some pas...
”Governments are instituted among men, deriving their powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”Marcus Yallow may not be a typical 17 year old kid, but he is fairly harmless. He might hack...
Torn between two and three stars. I enjoyed reading this; the plot was interesting, and all the informative parts were pretty accessible (well, the computer/crypto stuff was done much, much better than the history). But I thought the writing was pretty bad--it got increasingly melodramatic as the book went along. I kept waiting for Marcus to say to one of his friends "But down here, it's our time! It's our time down here!". I never bought his voice as that of an American kid--there were Britishi...
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 h...
More polemic than novel, Little Brother is the kind of book I would have devoured when I was a teenager. I gave it to my teenage son, and he went nuts for it (he isn't a reader) and was inspired by the various suggestions in the text to learn more about RFID, surveillance, privacy, EFF, Linux, and other technologies Doctorow explores or mentions in the text.The story and characters aren't as complex as they could have been, but I didn't mind. Cory wrote this for teenagers, and he was clearly mor...
One of the things that I love most about science fiction is its ability to look at trends in contemporary society, extrapolate them to their most extreme ends, and then use those extremes to reveal a fantastic analysis of our world and the directions that we are heading down. Good science fiction is the type that makes you step back when you finish and take a closer look at our own lives. With Little Brother, Cory Doctorow has crafted just such a novel. The fact that this is a book whose intende...
2.5 StarsWell that had a whole lot of 'splaining throughout which, whilst necessary, made for some long dull moments in this YA dystopia.I know this has been very popular but I honestly feel like it hasn't aged well. The main character makes lots of pervy comments about girls and says he can't hug his kidnapped, injured and traumatised male friend because guys don't hug each other. I think we have moved past that mentality as a society right? On the positive side, I really liked the way the dyst...
I have to admit that the first couple pages or so had me rolling my eyes and wondering if I would be able to actually finish this book. There's so much technoslang that it seemed to me to be trying too hard, even though it is a book about hackers and technokids... Like, "Spending Fridays at school was teh suck anyway, and I was glad of an excuse to make my escape." Teh suck? Really. Ugh. (Although, to be fair, at least he spelled out "suck" and didn't write "teh sux" or something. I probably wou...
Honestly, this book was awful. I had so many problems with it. First of all, it's extremely preachy. This could go both ways. If you agree with Cory Doctorow you would like it, however if your political views do not match up with Cory's you will find yourself angry and annoyed at the preachiness. The book is also very condescending. Reading it is just like having a friend who keeps assuming you don't know what things mean and stops to explain every other word to you. The book explains EVERYTHING...