"Nathan McCall understands the violence and hopelessness gripping African American youngsters perhaps better that any other modern writer," noted a contributor for Contemporary Black Biography. McCall, author of the memoir Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America, and a collection of essays on race relations, What's Going On: Personal Essays, is himself a former felon who spent three years in the Virginia prison system for armed robbery. However, when McCall first applied for work as a journalist he hid the fact that he had served time. Eventually, however, he not only told his future employer (the Washington Post) about his past, he made it the subject of his first book, Makes Me Wanna Holler. And with the publication a few years later of What's Going On, a collection that presents his views on a variety of subjects relating to racism and the lives of African...