As to the topical descriptions, they appear to be accurate enough to satisfy an exacting student of Americana.

Like Houdini’s audiences, I am made to enjoy being fooled. I, for one, although no friend of that aberration, am willing to forgive any historical novelist who makes his flights from historical fact as funny and pertinent as Doctorow makes his. “This mixture of fact and fiction may confuse or mislead the unwary or historically uninformed reader, and it suggests a projection onto the past of the suspect techniques of the New Journalism. “As dead serious as Nineteen Eighty-Four, as potentially important a ‘novel of ideas,’ with a much more engaging central character and an apparently inexhaustible supply of information on everything from brewing coffee to sneaky surveillance and how to defeat it.It was evident to him that the world composed and recomposed itself constantly in an endless process of dissatisfaction. Surrounded by friends who consider him a hacker hero, stalked by people who look like they’re used to inflicting pain, Marcus has to act, and act fast. When Marcus witnesses Masha’s kidnapping by the same agents who detained and tortured him earlier, he has to decide whether to save her or leak the archive that will cost his employer the election and put thousands at risk.

Then his former nemesis, Masha, emerges with a thumbdrive containing WikiLeaks-style evidence of government wrongdoing. Homeland A few years after the events of Little Brother, California’s economy collapses and Marcus finds himself employed by a crusading politician who promises reform. Can one brilliant teenage hacker actually fight back? Maybe, but only if he’s very careful.and if he chooses his friends well.

He knows that no one will believe him, which leaves him one option: to take down the DHS himself. When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his friends are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they are brutally interrogated for days. I’d recommend Little Brother over pretty much any book I’ve read this year.” –Neil Gaiman Little Brother Marcus Yallow is seventeen years old when he skips school and finds himself caught in the aftermath of a terrorist attack on San Francisco.

Homeland doctorow novel