Little Brother, Cory Doctorow; Tor Teen

“After being interrogated for days by the Department of Homeland Security in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco, California, seventeen-year-old Marcus, released into what is now a police state, decides to use his expertise in computer hacking to set things right.”
Robin’s Note: This title, set in a very near possible future, is one of the best recent thrill rides.  Little Brother combines a lot of ideas: security, terrorism, patriotism, and loyalty mix with gaming, hacking, and clever non-violent public protests.  The insight of Marcus’s computer invasions are exciting and impressive, like any good movie where one side outsmarts the other.  Once the story begins, it never lets up, and pulls you right through to the end.  Doctorow poses a lot of questions along the way in this book, and does have clear concerns about civil rights and government restrictions, but the most engaging part of this book is the tense adventure.

Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode The Internet Out Of Idaho, Jon Katz; Villard

“Jesse and Eric were roommates in the tiny town of Caldwell, Idaho, nineteen-year-old working class kids eking out a living with their seven-dollar-an-hour jobs selling and fixing computers. College was never in the cards. Their families had been torn apart by divorce and hard times, separation and illness. They had almost no social lives, and little to look forward to. Geeks is the story of how Jesse and Eric—and others like them—used technology to try and change their lives and alter their destiny.”
Robin’s Note: This is an intriguing memoir about two guys who became part of the dotcom boom in the 1990s, and gives a strong portrait of the time and place that allowed them to escape their fate trapped in a small town with no community outside message boards.  The rise of the internet and internet business is featured in this book, and it’s fascinating to see how much the world has changed since in terms of both the Internet and in terms of the opportunities technology still brings.