How long does it take to read Makes Me Wanna Holler?
Nathan McCall
Makes Me Wanna Holler by Nathan McCall takes about 7 hours 38 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 7 hours 38 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1994. 416 pages, about 114,400 words.
16 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 12 hours 43 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 7 hours 38 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 4 hours 46 minutes |
The page count is the median across 6 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
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.
Subjects: Journalists, Afro-American men, Afro-Americans, African American men, African Americans, African American youth
