SOURCE: "In Living Color," in Entertainment Weekly, No. 212, March 4, 1994, pp. 56-57.

[Lyons is an American essayist, reviewer, and nonfiction writer. In the following review, he argues that McCall's autobiography, although valid and moving, is ultimately dissatisfactory in its examination of McCall and its other black characters.]

Many are the perils of autobiography. Seemingly the simplest form of storytelling, it tempts the unwary author with that most seductive narcotic: the first-person singular. Tricky enough in the hands of a literary sophisticate like James Baldwin or Philip Roth, the urge to turn one's life into narrative can easily lead less gifted authors into revelations very different from those they intended.

So it is with Nathan McCall's Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man In America, the often remarkable, often remarkably obtuse saga of its author's seemingly improbable journey from a Virginia penitentiary for armed robbery to a career as...