SOURCE: "The Crucible of Violence," in Book World—The Washington Post, February 6, 1994, p. 2.

[In the following review, Ruffins praises McCall's autobiography for its honest attempt at helping other African-American men with similar backgrounds and beliefs to understand their own rational and emotional needs.]

I've-been-to-prison books are always bridges. Some, like Monster by gangsta' celebrity Monster Kody Scott, span the gulf between the reader's world and life in the deadliest gangs or toughest prisons. But in more important works such as Nathan McCall's Makes Me Wanna Holler, pris-Nathan McCall

In Autobiography of Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice or George Jackson's Soledad Brother, it is the stature of the author that lends significance to the memoir; the junkie/convict evolves into the revolutionary hero or martyred saint. Why then, is Holler a real contribution to...