Makes me wanna holler

Description

When Nathan McCall was ten, he played childhood games with neighborhood kids. At fourteen, the games had changed to gang fights, gang bangs, and petty theft. When he graduated high school, he was a sometime mugger and a father-to-be. And when he was sent to prison at twenty for armed robbery, he had already shot a man and gotten involved with drugs. Why did a smart kid from a caring family in a suburban black working-class neighborhood go so horribly wrong? In this shattering and unflinchingly honest autobiography, Washington Post reporter McCall looks back on his journey from troubled youth to professional journalist and shows that the easy answers - poverty, terrible home life, lack of education - don't always apply. "The problems among us," he writes of acquaintances who ended up addicted, imprisoned, or dead, "are more complex than something we can throw jobs, recreation centers, social programs, or more policemen at." In recounting his story, McCall makes brilliantly clear how young black men, feeling they have no options in a society that devalues them, try to maintain self-respect by going against everything the white "system" stands for, adopting the pose of the outlaw and a code of macho violence.

First Sentence

The fellas and I were hanging out on our corner one afternoon when the strangest thing happened.

Excerpt

The fellas and I were hanging out on our corner one afternoon when the strangest thing happened.

Subjects

Other Editions

• Makes me wanna holler: a young Black man in AmericaRandom House1994-01-01
• Makes Me Wanna HollerPaperbackVintage Books1994-01-01
• Makes Me Wanna HollerVintage Books USA1995-06-01
• Makes Me Wanna HollerPerfection Learning Prebound1995-09-01
• Makes Me Wanna HollerTandem Library1999-10-01
• Makes Me Wanna HollerKnopf Doubleday Publishing Group2011-01-01