When Nathan McCall was 10, he played childhood games with neighborhood kids. At 14, the games had changed to gang fights, gang bangs and petty theft. When he graduated from high school, he was a sometime mugger and a father-to-be. And when he was sent to prison at age 20 for armed robbery, he had already shot a man and gotten involved with drugs.
Why did a smart kid from a caring family go so horribly wrong?
In his unflinchingly honest autobiography, Makes Me Wanna Holler, A Young Black Man in America, McCall looks back on his journey from troubled youth to professional journalist and shows that for black people in America the easy answers don’t always apply.
Makes Me Wanna Holler was a New York Times bestseller and won the Blackboard Book of the Year Award for 1995. In praise of the autobiography, noted scholar Henry Louis Gates wrote, “Sooner of later every generation must find its voice. It may be that ours belongs to Nathan McCall, whose memoir is…a stirring tale of transformation. He is a mesmerizing storyteller.”