Synopsis
"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." "In the brutal world of prison, McCall transformed himself through disciplined reading, study, and thought, discovering books like Native Son and talking with jailhouse philosophers versed in Marx and Malcolm X. After his release, he went back to school and began a career in journalism. In some ways the newsrooms were as perilous as the streets - McCall outlines the hidden prejudice and racial friction blacks encounter working in the white mainstream, even among the seemingly liberal members of the media." "Raucously funny, profoundly disturbing, and powerfully written, Makes Me Wanna Holler is a revelatory book with an original voice."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved