Rating: 
Summary: Painful Yet Honest
Review: I got bored one weekend and picked up this book that had been recommended to me by a male teacher. Once I got into the book, I had many mixed feelings. Nathan did some terrible things to young black women and reading those parts really made this black woman cringe. As bad as those things were, I got the feeling that while Nathan was writing them he felt they were the "good ole days." Illegitimate babies... Drugs... Gang Rape... all of the horrible things he did... well it was biographical. The reading is interesting... and honest and for that you have to give it to the man. The stories themselves were terrible.
Rating: 
Summary: Teaching Racism
Review: I am a special education teacher and I teach students with emotional problems in a low economic school. I read this book in college and found it an eye-opening experience into a world I knew little to nothing about. This year I decided to use this book in my class to teach my students racism, opportunity and most importantly seeing their futures thru someones eyes who has been where they are and were most of my students are headed. The majority of my students have been in jail or have lived on the streets or in a car at some point in their lives. My students where not only amazed at how much they learned, but at how much they enjoyed reading.Can you imagine my joy when I actually saw my students begging me to take their books home so they could finish the chapter. Keep in mind these kids would never ever take anything home, especially not a book! As a teacher and as someone who was oblivious to the lifestyles and struggles of most minorities I would definetly reccomend this book to anyone who feels life too easy or when you think your life is going array. This book would also be great for parents who may not understand or have forgotten the pressures of being a teenager. I hope my review was insightful and helpful.
Rating:
Summary: A Warning of Struggle
Review: My name is Timothy Booker, better known as Booker,Tee. I'm 17 years old and a Jr. at Amador Valley Highschool in Pleasanton,California. I gotta tell ya Nathan McCall is one hell of a writer. Throuhout the book I felt like I was right there with him experiencing the same crap. Because of that book I can tell people about things that I never exprienced in my life such as racial discrimination, prison life, and fatherhood. This book is basically a young black man's warning of black struggle in the U.S. Because of this book I have quit messing around with sistas and treated them with more respect than before. I started to be ALOT! more cautious of who I date (especially after reading about Debbie, Nate's ex-wife). Although I have never really faced racial discrimination, I have faced extremely dumb steriotypes about black folks comming from white folks. You see, Amador Valley is a prodominently white school. I attended there sophomore year. On my first day of P.E. class we were playing baseketball. When we were picking teams for a game, I was the first person picked on a team, assumning that since I was black I was good at baseketball. Not only that but I am in no way at all fit for the game of baseketball,but all they saw was the color of my skin. I truely believe that Nathan McCall is a changed man! I don't care what anybody says. The man fell into a ditch and struggled climbing out but he made it! I would love to meet this man. I wouldn't want an autograph or anything like that. I would just like to shake the hand of the man that changed me mentally and spiritually and changed the way I look at life. On behalf of every young black man,I would like to say thank you, Brother Nathan McCAll, for this warning of struggle in this place that should be foreign to our people, America.
Rating:
Summary: Nathan McCall
Review: This book has interesting twists, highlights, and lowlights-a roller coaster of events that lead a young man, Nathan McCall, from the troubled streets of Portsmouth Virginia to the flooded cells of jails and prison. The begins right away with Nathan and his homies catching a white boy and beating the living snot out of him, which Nathan says was for general principle, or just because he was white and for what white men did to blacks in the past. After this event the book takes off like the "Raging Bull" ride at Great America.
Nathan takes you through his youth. From dealing with discrimination and racism, to finding his own identity as a young teenager in the streets and in the schools. He begins to hang out a lot and even though he comes from a home with working class parents, friends, girls and the mean and violent streets steer him in the wrong direction and he finds himself in trouble with the law. He then goes into a state of hustling as a way to provide for him while he is out on the streets and as a way to keep up with the latest trends material wise. From stealing and drug trafficking to fist fights and gun battles to roasting, sweet-talking and gang rape, these are some of the tough experiences that he encountered through his long journey.
His wild and fast ride slows down as he finds a young girl (Liz) who keeps him out of trouble and away from the streets; he eventually graduates from high school (barely) and starts college.
The ride begins to pick up speed again as he becomes a young father. He makes another mistake when shoots a man. Because of a good lawyer, and the fact he was doing well in college at the time, he gets off with a light sentence and small fines. But the next time he got into trouble, he went from jail to prison on a 3-year stint.
While in prison, he begins to look at things differently and see the light on life. After his stint in prison he changes his life around completely: finishing college (Norfolk Univ.), becoming a Muslim, and landing jobs in the nations top newsrooms-The Atlanta Constitutional-Journal and The Washington Post-as a journalist.
From the beginning to end, this book is exceptionally well written with real situations and sharp viewpoints. In writing this book Nathan definitely shows the readers that you can fall flat on your face and still pick yourself up and become something in life no matter the situation. The flow and each upcoming event will keep you glued from the beginning to the end of the book.
Rating:
Summary: Makes Me Wanna Holler: A White Male's Reaction
Review: In this book, Nathan McCall admits to rape, assault, attempted murder, and a variety of other things that he didn't go to jail for. It's one of a number of African American biographies with a similar storyline. He starts off well, gets into trouble, manages to make it through high school, yet eventually ends up in prison for an armed robbery of a McDonalds. After embracing Islam he pursues a career in the white mainstream. At different points of his development he has gangbanged, had children with different women, and committed an array of crimes. And yet as a white male, I empathized with him every step of the way. He's an excellent writer, and his bold use of language (he doesn't shy away from profanity as if it didn't exist) helps to achieve an articulate story that for me, changed my perspective. I realized after reading this book that black and white lives are so different that I couldn't possibly imagine what their life was like. No white male could. But anyone can read the book, and I suggest that if you are a white person, an affluent person, or any person who hasn't seen gang warfare, police brutality, or broken neighborhoods you must read the book. If you recognize your social privileges, then you must read this book. I think that honest, intelligient, and passionate writers like Nathan McCall can open eyes. He doesn't bridge gaps so much as just put people on the same eye level that would otherwise not be. He doesn't push. He simply communicates his life story, as clearly as any accomplished journalist such as McCall communicates a news story.
Rating:
Summary: An eye-opener
Review: I am a white, middle-class, middle-aged teacher, and I felt this book was an eye-opener for me. It should be standard reading in all of the schools for ALL races. I was disturbed, appalled, saddened, and inspired by Nathan McCall's journey in life. It makes me even more determined to even the playing field for my students, and to make them understand that racism is alive and well today and must be slayed by each one of them!
Rating: 
Summary: Thought provoking
Review: It's natural as a reader to fit McCall's autobiography in a long and distinguished line of fine narratives by African-American writers. From Frederick Douglass to George Jackson and Eldridge Cleaver, we have had gritty but often poetic prose illuminating the pain of segregation and racism as well as the pride won through difficult struggle. McCall, in "Makes Me Wanna Holler," attempts to pick up this torch, and he succeeds, although the story he must tell is a far different one than the one told by his literary predecessors. McCall, born in the mid-'50s, led a far different life growing up than say, Richard Wright, James Baldwin or Claude Brown, let alone Frederick Douglass. He grew up in a working class/middle class section of Portsmouth, Virginia, had strong guidance from his mother and hard-working stepfather and never describes in the memoir times of poverty or material want. Yet by his late teens he was, by his own description, a thug, and by his early twenties, he had shot and nearly killed a man and been convicted of armed robbery, for which he served three years in the Virginia penal system. For me, "Makes Me Wanna Holler" is, at bottom, a tale of unrelenting peer pressure as well as a meditation on the ambiguity of "making it" as an African-American in the '80s and early '90s, after the major civil rights battles had supposedly been won. In the first instance, McCall is seduced by the hoods and the hipsters of his neighborhood and essentially rejects the work ethic of his stepfather as well as the opportunity for education in favor of hanging with the crowd, drinking, doing drugs and exacting violent acts of vengenace on whites he blames for isolating and humilating him during a short stretch he spent at a junior high in his early adolescence. In the second instance, McCall, having served his time in prison and earning early parole, works his way up the mainstream ladder, getting a college degree in journalism and serving successful stints at newspapers in Portsmouth, Atlanta and finally the Washington Post. What would seem to be a tale of success is not because, as McCall relates in great detail, the anger he still feels toward whites and the difficulty he has adjusting to a corporate world that often seems phony and ultimately geared against him keeps him on edge and often saps him of his emotional strength. These two strands of the book make it a much more difficult read than the line of African-American autobiographies of which it is a part, from the memoirs of Frederick Douglass, through the works of Richard Wright, James Baldwin, James Weldon Johnson, Claude Brown, Malcolm X, George Jackson and Eldridge Cleaver. These men faced highly visible and significant educational, political and social barriers. All dealt with the psychological and cultural barriers faced by African-Americans, but none more so than McCall. Indeed, near the end of the book, he confesses that he sometimes no longer knows whether the anxiety and hostility he feels around whites comes from their attitudes or from his own uncertainty about what they are actually feeling. McCall's book ultimately describes a search for values that will sustain him in a world in which he often feels himself a stranger. The work points up and ultimately destroys the comfortable illusion we have that we're all really alike at bottom. We're not, McCall insists. There is a black culture that is very different from mainstream white culture, and the gap will not easily be bridged. It's a strong and worthwhile book, one that is at times slightly marred by long dissertations about his marital difficulties. He used them in part for an interesting and important discussion about the duties of fatherhood, with which he struggled, but he also spends too much time lamenting he injustices of divorce, which I found to be a distraction and a detriment to the power of the narrative.
Rating:
Summary: Riveting! I couldn't put the book down.
Review: Disturbing? Yes, but well written and provocative. Nathan McCall writes about running a 'train' on young girls as an adolescent, along with a laundry list of other horrific acts from drug abuse to armed robbery. I was mortified at first, but realized that this was reality. I remember boys talking about 'running trains' when I was a young girl. It made me sit down and have a long, candid discussion with my children. McCall is an exceptional writer. His story is disheartening yet inspiring. It illustrates that we are all capable of change. It also a testimonial of a disturbing truth - you can come from a two-parent household in a working-class neighborhood and still screw up your life. But the good news is that this book offers insight into how to cope with the realities of life. It is more than just a story about Nate McCall. It is a story about conditioning: Conditioning oneself to change, to be more proactive [not reactive] and make better decisions in life. It also communicates the things we often want to say, but dare not say.
Rating:
Summary: Thought Provoking
Review: McCall may be self-righteous jerk at times, but this book really makes you think about race and "the system" in general. His realtionships with women are troubling, but I'm not here to judge the man, just the book he wrote. The book is excellent.
Rating:
Summary: Mixed Emotions
Review: This book brought on very different emotions. On one hand I understand his frustration. He came of age in a country that at the time was very intense racially. I think a lot of his anger stems from being sent to that white school. My mother went through the same thing so I know that can have a lasting affect on a young African American. HOWEVER, he can not use that as an excuse for his criminal past. I HATE excuses. lIke others have said, he CHOSE to become a criminal and the theme of "white folks are to blame" really gets on my nerves. These were some sick individuals in this book. The white boys they had to deal with in school had nothing to do with the pain and suffering they caused to others. He mentions robbing or beating up people because they are white like that was an OK thing to do....EXCUSE ME?! Isn't that the same thing racist whites used to do to African Americans? Hypocrisy... Anyway, I felt deeply disturbed after readig this book. I only gave it three stars because it is pretty well written. It flows easy.
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