For the first drafts of the book, I kept my birth name off the title page. The old me wasn’t writing this book. Something was different. Something had changed. I had always admired George Orwell, and had read his collected essays and letters countless times. When Eric Blair became Orwell, he was set free, liberated from his Eton education and colonial policeman past. And there was another factor about the title page that troubled me. I was telling my readers that this new system of information technology was going to destroy our privacy, and that they should resist this change. It seemed hypocritical to go on a book tour or appear on a talk show blabbing about my life when our private lives were under attack.

The real story is this …I was walking through a forest and encountered a hawk nesting area.
Twelve hawks circled around my head for about ten minutes …so close that the tip of their
wings brushed the side of my head. That was why I picked the name. REAL hawks. Not symbolic ones.