Three New Non-Fiction

The "Wealth Matters" columnist of the New York Times reveals the habits, worldviews, and practices that lead to true wealth--and why it's more important to be "wealthy" than "rich."

For the better part of the past decade, Paul Sullivan has written about and lived among some of the wealthiest people in America. He has learned how they save, spend, and invest their money; how they work and rest; how they use their wealth to give their children educational advantages but not strip them of motivation. He has also seen how they make horrendous mistakes.

Firsthand, Sullivan knows why some people, even "rich" people, never find true wealth, and why other people, even those who have far less are much wealthier.
Sullivan is part of the "The One Percent" today, but he came from far humbler roots, starting life in the bottom twenty-five percent. This personal book shows how others can make better financial decisions--and come to terms with what money means to them. It lays out how they can avoid the pitfalls around saving, spending and giving their money away and think differently about wealth to lead more secure and less stressful lives. An essential complement to all of the financial advice available, this unique guide is a welcome antidote to the idea that wealth is a number on a bank statement.

It has been called "the great destroyer" and "the evil." The Pentagon refers to it as "the pervasive menace." It destroys cars, fells bridges, sinks ships, sparks house fires, and nearly brought down the Statue of Liberty. Rust costs America more than $400 billion per year--more than all other natural disasters combined.

In a thrilling drama of man versus nature, journalist Jonathan Waldman travels from Key West, Florida, to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to meet the colorful and often reclusive people who are fighting our mightiest and unlikeliest enemy. He sneaks into an abandoned steelworks with a brave artist, and then he nearly gets kicked out of Ball Corporation's Can School. Across the Arctic, he follows a massive high-tech robot that hunts for rust in the Alaska pipeline. On a Florida film set he meets the Defense Department's rust ambassador, who reveals that the navy's number one foe isn't a foreign country but oxidation itself. At Home Depot's mother ship in Atlanta, he hunts unsuccessfully for rust products with the store's rust-products buyer--and then tracks down some snake-oil salesmen whose potions are not for sale at the Rust Store. Along the way, Waldman encounters flying pigs, Trekkies, decapitations, exploding Coke cans, rust boogers, and nerdy superheroes.

The result is a fresh and often funny account of an overlooked engineering endeavor that is as compelling as it is grand, illuminating a hidden phenomenon that shapes the modern world. Rust affects everything from the design of our currency to the composition of our tap water, and it will determine the legacy we leave on this planet. This exploration of corrosion, and the incredible lengths we go to fight it, is narrative nonfiction at its very best--a fascinating and important subject, delivered with energy and wit.

The true story of the game that never should have happened.

Something was happening to basketball.

In the wartime fall of 1943, at the little-known North Carolina College for Negroes, Coach John McLendon was on the verge of changing the game forever. Within six months, his Eagles would become the highest scoring college basketball team in America, a fast-breaking, hard-pressing juggernaut that would shatter its opponents by as many as sixty points per game. The last student of James Naismith, basketball's inventor, McLendon had opened the door to its future.

Across town, at Duke University, the best basketball squad on campus wasn't the Blue Devils, but was an all-white military team from the Duke medical school. Comprised of former college stars from across the country, they dismantled every team they faced, including the Duke varsity. They were prepared to play anyone-that is, until an audacious invitation arrived, one that was years ahead of anything the South had ever seen before.

Based on years of research, The Secret Game is a story of courage and determination, and of an incredible, long-buried moment in the nation's sporting past. The riveting true account of a remarkable season, it is the story of how handful of forgotten college basketball players not only changed the game forever, but also helped to usher in a new America.