Hacker Cracker: a Journey from the Mean Streets of Brooklyn to the Frontiers of Cyberspace.

by Ejovi Nuwere and David Chanoff William Morrow, October 2002 $24.95, ISBN 0-066-21079-8

In Hacker Cracker, Ejovi Nuwere (with coauthor David Chanoff) shares his unlikely life story, that of a kid from a poor Brooklyn neighborhood who becomes an expert computer hacker and later a computer security specialist. The events of Nuwere's young life alone are enough for interesting reading. Still, this autobiography captures recent history through two different prisms. The first is familiar--the black ghetto further decimated as crack ravages families and the community on the whole. The second, occurring in the mid-1990s, captures the rise of the Internet and the World Wide Web, and the infancy of the fastest-adopted media technology in history.

Nuwere's childhood was nothing if not eventful. Growing up in a Nigerian, immigrant family with a house full of relatives in Bedford-Stuyvesant, he had firsthand interactions with drug dealers, gangsters and violence--whether he wanted to or not. Though his mother was a drug addict, his grandmother, uncles and family friends provided him with a loving foundation. One of those uncles was a thief, which often brought the police to the family's door. But another was more of a nerd--reserved, constantly in his room studying, away from trouble. This uncle, 14 years older than Nuwere, owned a computer and had an America Online account years before it was commonplace.

Like many urban kids, Nuwere came of age in junior high school. By then, he had already seen a young man shot to death, become a member of the baby Decepticons gang, while the neighborhood hustlers became his role models. His interests turned to acting and he spent time on some television and movie sets in Brooklyn, eventually making it into the High School for the Performing Arts. At 13, he knew and understood hacking, and in high school he picked up warez (pirated software) trading and frequented chat rooms, where other backers traded software files illegally. Today, Ejovi Nuwere is a security specialist for a financial firm, but he sharpened his skills as a teenager. For all his talent, he is, for the most part, self-taught.

Hacker Cracker is an engaging story about survival and success, as the book jacket notes. It certainly makes a point about overcoming insurmountable odds, and David Chanoff insures a smooth narrative. Every teen and every parent should read it, in all the Bedford-Stuyvesants around the country.

--Tracy Grant is a contributor to BIBR.