Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

It's ironic that Marcus, the main character of this novel, is so painfully aware of his own l'esprit de l'escalier (literally, "stairway wit" -- the witty comeback you think of after it's too late to use it). "Little Brother" is one big example of Doctorow's own l'esprit de l'escalier. If only we lived in a world where the people who work for the Department of Homeland Security were transparently one-dimensional and evil, if only DHS were massively more invasive into every facet of our lives instead of just having useless airport security checks, and if only Doctorow were a hacker who was caught in the wrong place at the wrong time during a terrorist attack. If only all of those would come true, then Doctorow would save the day. By the time you reach the conclusion, wherein Marcus somehow ends up as a blogger on a site not entirely unlike Doctorow's own BoingBoing, the sense of l'esprit de l'escalier is so palpable that you could cut it with a knife. Unsurprising, since you've been wading through it for the past 350 pages. I entered into this book as an entirely sympathetic audience. Several of the authors who offered up enthusiastic reviews are ones whose work I admire and whose recommendations are usually spot-on. I've donated to both the ACLU and the EFF; I even own packing tape with the Fourth Amendment printed on it that I use on my checked luggage when I fly. I believe that the so-called security that we see at the airport is nothing more than a waste of time, money, and energy for all involved. I like my civil liberties, and seeing them eroded sparks a letter-writing campaign to my representatives. Oh, yes, and I'm a geek. I cracked open this book fully expecting to love every single word on the page, expecting to identify with the characters and the story. It took me until page 20 to realise that I hated it. The pages upon pages of useless exposition on everything from Mission-style burritos to a rather flawed discussion of network tunneling bog the book down. Worse, so does the propaganda that Marcus spews at every opportunity about liberty and freedom. I agree with pretty much all of the politics expressed herein, but reading it like this made me want to backhand Marcus and tell him to just move on already. Even worse is the painfully simplistic storyline. For all that Marcus claims to be a hacker, he doesn't actually accomplish any hacks (and certainly not by coding). His single biggest hack is that he copies a particularly secure Linux distribution, burns CDs, and hands them out to people. If burning CDs makes one a hacker, then my mom just earned her 1337 merit badge. Burning CDs and blogging is apparently enough to bring down the DHS. Of course, the DHS here is portrayed as single-minded, one-dimensional, and singularly evil; and anyone who in the days after a terrorist attack is freaked out and thus supportive of additional security is also mindless and evil. So bringing down the DHS with an alternate Internet and poorly-written privacy rants on a blog isn't actually a big deal. My mom, hacker extraordinaire that she now apparently is, could've done it. It's not that I disagree with any of the ideas put forth in this novel. For the most part, I strongly agree with them. It's that the package in which they are wrapped is poorly considered, poorly argued, and poorly written. The ideas herein are important and absolutely must be discussed, but the execution of those ideas is so heavyhanded as to make the book near-unreadable.