MAKES ME WANNA HOLLER- A Young Black Man In America by Nathan McCall

 Refinished Sa 1/1/22 First book of the new year

This is the third time that I have read this book. I got this book from Quality Paperback Books and finished originally on We 9/14/94 and I read it again in January of 2017.

McCall is from the Norfolk, Portsmouth area of Virginia. You don't really think of this as a particularly racist part of the country, but I guess this is the point of the book. Racism is endemic to all parts of America. 

He was a very violent young man and I wonder if he would have gotten a better shake in the courts if he had have been born later. I tend to doubt it.

Racism obviously had a negative impact on his life, but the fact that he fathered so many children probably hurt him much worse. A vasectomy would have saved him a whole lot of heartache. 

The review at Publishers Weekly:

"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."

Columbia picked up the movie rights.