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Makes Me Wanna Holler
Makes Me Wanna Holler
A Young Black Man in America
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • One of our most visceral and important memoirs on race in America, this is the story of Nathan McCall, who began life as a smart kid in a close, protective family in a black working-class neighborhood.
Yet by the age of fifteen, McCall was packing a gun and embarking on a criminal career that five years later would land him in prison for armed robbery.
In these pages, McCall chronicles his passage from the street to the prison yard—and, later, to the newsrooms of The Washington Post and ultimately to the faculty of Emory University. His story is at once devastating and inspiring, at once an indictment and an elegy. Makes Me Wanna Holler became an instant classic when it was first published in 1994 and it continues to bear witness to the great troubles—and the great hopes—of our nation.
With a new afterword by the author
Yet by the age of fifteen, McCall was packing a gun and embarking on a criminal career that five years later would land him in prison for armed robbery.
In these pages, McCall chronicles his passage from the street to the prison yard—and, later, to the newsrooms of The Washington Post and ultimately to the faculty of Emory University. His story is at once devastating and inspiring, at once an indictment and an elegy. Makes Me Wanna Holler became an instant classic when it was first published in 1994 and it continues to bear witness to the great troubles—and the great hopes—of our nation.
With a new afterword by the author
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • One of our most visceral and important memoirs on race in America, this is the story of Nathan McCall, who began life as a smart kid in a close, protective family in a black working-class neighborhood.
Yet by the age of fifteen, McCall was packing a gun and embarking on a criminal career that five years later would land him in prison for armed robbery.
In these pages, McCall chronicles his passage from the street to the prison yard—and, later, to the newsrooms of The Washington Post and ultimately to the faculty of Emory University. His story is at once devastating and inspiring, at once an indictment and an elegy. Makes Me Wanna Holler became an instant classic when it was first published in 1994 and it continues to bear witness to the great troubles—and the great hopes—of our nation.
With a new afterword by the author
Yet by the age of fifteen, McCall was packing a gun and embarking on a criminal career that five years later would land him in prison for armed robbery.
In these pages, McCall chronicles his passage from the street to the prison yard—and, later, to the newsrooms of The Washington Post and ultimately to the faculty of Emory University. His story is at once devastating and inspiring, at once an indictment and an elegy. Makes Me Wanna Holler became an instant classic when it was first published in 1994 and it continues to bear witness to the great troubles—and the great hopes—of our nation.
With a new afterword by the author
Reviews-
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January 30, 1995
McCall's autobiography--a seven-week PW bestseller--tracks his trajectory from the streets of Portsmouth, Va., to prison, rehabilitation and a job at the Washington Post; features a new introduction by the author. -
Starred review from January 31, 1994
Gripping and candid, this autobiography tracks McCall's path from street-happy hustler in a working-class black neighborhood in Portsmouth, Va., to a three-year prison term for armed robbery, a decision to rehabilitate himself, and his successful struggles as a journalist, finally reaching the Washington Post . In street argot, McCall mixes memorable, often painful description with hard-won insight: on how a teenage gang rape of a 13-year-old girl represented black self-hate or why his militant 1970s generation was unwilling to make the compromises that his stepfather made. It was in jail that a wise older inmate taught McCall lessons about survival between lessons on chess. (``The white pieces always move first, giving them an immediate advantage over the black pieces, just like in life.'') McCall's entry into the middle-class white mainstream was not easy and he unsparingly details his difficulties and tensions with white newsroom colleagues, struggles with marriage and fatherhood, and painful visits back to his decimated Portsmouth neighborhood. Keenly aware of the tragedy of lost boyhood buddies, McCall offers no formulas, but warns that the new generation is even more alienated than his was. Film rights to Columbia Pictures; author tour. -
The San Francisco Chronicle
"Not since Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land has there been such an honest and searching look at the perils of growing up a black male in urban America....A compelling depiction of the toll that racism and misguided notions of manhood have taken in the life of one black man--and, by implication, many others."
