Doctorow, Cory. Little brother

Kliatt, July, 2008 by Paula Rohrlick

DOCTOROW, Cory. Little brother. Tor. 382p. bibliog. c2008.978-0-7653-1985-2. $17.95. SA *

Marcus, age 17, and his hacker friends pick the wrong day to cut school. They get caught up in the chaos following a major terrorist attack on San Francisco and are taken away by the Department of Homeland Security for heavy-handed interrogation. When Marcus is finally released, he's infuriated at how his civil rights were ignored, and even angrier to find that in the wake of the attack the DHS has turned the city into a police state, installing all kinds of invasive security devices and treating everyone as possible suspects. "No price was too high for security," the President has declared, but Marcus disagrees, and he sets out to take down the DHS, using all the subversive online tactics he and his clever friends can dream up.

Suspenseful, fast-moving and crammed full of techno-talk, this tale of rebellious, freedom-loving geeks vs. repressive authority is all too believable. Doctorow is a well-known tech journalist and novelist, and Afterwords by a security technologist and an Xbox hacker from MIT reinforce the message about the importance of standing up for freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution. This updated version of 1984 will have great appeal to all the techno-types in your community. Paula Rohrlick, KLIATT