Geeks

January 31, 2000
While promoting his book Virtuous Reality, journalist Katz was introduced to the world of "geeks," those smart, technically savvy misfits who are ostracized by their high school peers. Katz wrote in his column on the slashdot.org Web site about the isolation, exclusion and maltreatment--from dirty looks to brutal beatings--such kids routinely face. Tens of thousands of anguished e-mails confirmed his story. One of the e-mailers was Jesse Dailey, a working-class 19-year-old trapped in rural Idaho, where he and his friend Eric Twilegar fixed computers for a living, and hacked and surfed the Web, convinced that they were losers and outcasts. Katz, also a writer for Wired and Rolling Stone, traveled to Idaho to meet the pair, intending to chronicle their lives. He wound up encouraging and sometimes assisting Jesse and Eric as they tried to improve their lives by moving to Chicago, where they sought better jobs and even considered applying to college. Sometimes intensely earnest, Katz cuts back and forth between Jesse and Eric's story and more general discussions of the geeks' condition. Over the course of the book, Jesse and Eric come to represent geeks' collective weaknesses and strengths. While the bulk of the book has broad social and educational implications (concerning the fate of bright kids who don't come from socially and educationally privileged backgrounds), it is a highly personal tale: Katz takes us inside the lives of these two young men, shows us their sense of isolation, their complete absorption in the cyberworld, their distrust of authority and institutions, and their attempts to negotiate an often hostile society. He breaks through the stereotype and humanizes this outcast group of young people.

August 4, 2000
YA-Katz sets out to explain geek culture by tracing the life stories of two 19 year olds from Caldwell, ID. The young men had no money, no family support, but they did have a riveting passion for computers. A year after graduating from high school, they were desperately seeking relief from their dead-end jobs. By chance, the author received a moving e-mail message from one of them and traveled to Idaho to meet them. This meeting is the start of the boys' journey and is the book's beginning. Early on, readers realize that the biggest roadblock to their success was the educational system and the intolerance of others toward those not following the traditional direction of society. Students will identify with the situation. Many will see themselves in much of this book and realize that they can survive-and flourish-in real life. Geeks is well written, thought provoking, and attitude changing. Readers may not agree with all of Katz's sermonizing, but they will agree that America needs ideas like his to serve as a catalyst for change and progress. Above all, Geeks will bring about much needed thinking and dialogue about the experience of going to high school and the price people have paid and are paying for being different. Students will enjoy Katz's argument that even if society does not acknowledge their varying needs, geeks will ultimately ascend.-Linda A. Vretos, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, Alexandria, VA

Copyright 2000 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2000
Katz discovered the world he was destined to chronicle when he started writing about computer geeks for "Wired," "Rolling Stone," and various Web sites. Once a "lost boy" himself, Katz brought respect and empathy to his groundbreaking portraits of young, "computer-centered obsessives," and many e-mailed him, including a 19-year-old Idahoan named Jesse. "Shockingly bright," Jesse, whose credo is "The Net provides," and Eric, his geek buddy, decide, after meeting Katz, to leave their grim little town and seek more fertile ground for their techie skills in Chicago, a relocation Katz chronicles with admiration and concern. Katz's involvement in their threadbare lives coincides with the shootings at Columbine, which adds urgency to his compelling insights into the geek nation's unique blend of alienation, fanaticism, and improvisation. Quintessential outsiders, these masters of cyberspace are now in the ascendancy, Katz observes, and their Net practices are radically altering everything from personal communications to "notions of commerce and ownership." Geeks may lack moral responsibility, but, as Katz so ardently demonstrates in this surprisingly dramatic and moving narrative, they are smart, creative, and wily, and they comprise a dynamic societal force that must be recognized. ((Reviewed February 1, 2000))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2000, American Library Association.)