5 Books Published by Main Street Books on AALBC — Book Cover Collage

A comprehensive and energizing guide, bursting with supportive topics: Finding Your Voice; Getting to Know Your Literary Ancestors; Gathering Material and Conducting Research; Tapping, Sweet, Bittersweet, and Joyful Memories. The guide also feature unforgettable excerpts from luminaries such as Maya Angelou, Brent Staples, Houston Baker, and pointers from bestselling African American authors E. Lynn Harris, James McBride, John Hope Franklin, Pearl Cleage, Edwidge Danticat, and many others. It is a uniquely nurturing and informative touchstone for affirming, bearing witness, leaving a legacy, and celebrating the remarkable journey of the self.

Death Row Records is one of the most successful music labels of all time.  From its inception in 1992, it exploded on the rap music scene with sales climbing to the $125 million mark in just four years.  Even more noticeable than the label’s financial success is the effect it had on American youth culture, making gangsta rap more popular with suburban white youth and MTV viewers than traditional rock groups.  But under the guidance of six-foot-four-inch, 300-pound CEO Marion "Suge" Knight, Death Row also became the most controversial record label in history—a place where violence, gang feuds, threats, intimidation, and brushes with death were business as usual.

Have Gun Will Travel details the spectacular rise and violent fall of a music label that had at its heart a ferocious criminal enterprise cloaked behind corporate facades that gave it a guise of legitimacy.  With inside access no other writer can claim, Ronin Ro, the country’s preeminent rap journalist, exposes the facts everyone else is afraid to divulge—from the initial bankrolling of Death Row by a leader of L.A.’s notorious Bloods gang, to links with New York’s Genovese crime family.  Have Gun Will Travel lays bare the full story behind this influential label, including the still-unsolved murders of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G., as well as Suge Knight’s rise to power, his fight with East Coast rap titans such as Sean "Puffy" Combs, and his eventual imprisonment.

Although it has been all over the news—from The Wall Street Journal to Rolling Stone—this is a timeless story about an empire built on greed, corruption, murder, and exploitation.  With exclusive interviews and bloodcurdling eyewitness accounts, Have Gun Will Travel combines the behind-the-scenes fascination of books like Hit Men and Hit and Run with the violence and dramatic sweep of The Godfather, in a brilliant and blistering document of contemporary culture.


From the Hardcover edition.

In a companion volume to Merlin’s Tour of the Universe, here is a completely new collection of questions and answers about the cosmos for stargazers of all ages.  Whether waxing about Earth and its environs, the Sun and its stellar siblings, the world of light, physical laws, or galaxies near and far, Merlin—a fictional visitor from Planet Omniscia—is easy to understand, often humorous, and always entertaining.

Merlin fields a wide range of questions from many curious mortals, and in so doing draws on his own vast knowledge as well as the expertise of many close friends, including Archimedes, Galileo, Einstein, and Santa.

So far, Merlin has not been stumped, responding to questions on mysteries such as:

If aliens exploded our moon, what effect would it have on us?
What are your thoughts on the theory that a star named Nemesis is circling our solar system and was responsible for killing off the dinosaurs?
Is it true that if I leave a container on my roof for a period of time, I can actually collect space particles from outer space?

Delightfully illustrated throughout, Just Visiting This Planet is a skywatcher’s book for lovers of the universe by one of its brightest lights.

William July, II is an author to watch.  In June 1996, his self-published Brothers, Lust, and Love: Thoughts on Manhood, Sex, and Romance climbed onto two bestseller lists.  Now, in this revised, expanded edition of this underground sensation, July shrewdly examines exactly what’s going on between African American men and women.  He explains:

Why women expect too much from men, and why men want too little
Why black men date white women, and why some call them traitors for doing it
The five things most men want to change about women
The real reason it’s so hard for black men and women to get along
How popular TV shows teach kids harmful stereotypes about couples
Why the black gender war is raging, and how it can be stopped

An engaging and informative book, Brothers, Lust, and Love reveals what every woman wants to know about her man, and what every man needs to know about himself.

Merlin, a fictional visitor from the Andromeda Galaxy, Planet Omniscia, has been friends with many of the most important scientific figures of the past including Kepler, da Vinci, Magellan, Doppler, Einstein and Hubble. In this delightful tour of the galaxies, Merlin often recounts his conversations with these historical figures in his responses to popular astronomy questions asked by adults and children alike. Merlin’s well-informed answers combine a unique combination of wit and poetry along with serious science explained in refreshingly clear, reader-friendly language.



Dear Merlin: Can a person cross our galaxy in a spaceship during one human lifespan?



Merlin: In 1905, Merlin’s good friend Albert Einstein introduced the "Special Theory of Relativity," which predicts that time will tick slower and slower the faster you travel. Were you to embark on such an adventure you could conceivably age as little as you wish, depending of course, on your exact speed. The problem arises when you return to Earth, which will have moved several hundred thousand years into the future and everyone will have forgotten about you.



A skywatcher’s book for lovers of the universe by one of its greatest lights.