RUST: THE LONGEST WAR
Jonathan Waldman
Simon & Schuster, March 10, 2015, $26.95
ISBN: 1451691599
Waldman reports:
I was part weary, half-seasick, and definitely broke when my idea for a book about rust came to me. I’d been living aboard a 40-foot sailboat in San Francisco for a year, coming to terms with a romance for the sea that was failing to develop. This was problematic, because I’d endeavored, with two friends, to fix up and sail that sloop around the world. It was to be a final grand adventure for us 30-year-olds before regular life took hold.
While the actual sailing part failed to compel me, the refitting part consumed me. Our boat was in a sorry state, and nothing was more satisfying than tearing out some rusted, rotted, worn-out, or otherwise janky component, and replacing it with something smart and sturdy. Who knows, maybe I should have been a carpenter. At any rate, there was so much rusty stuff to fix that I got to know all of the employees at the local chandleries, and learned the peculiar strengths of the dozen nearest hardware stores.
One store I enjoyed the most: the fastener distributor, up in Berkeley. On at least a dozen occasions I plopped bags of rusted screws on the counter and said to the owner, Larry, “Can you help me replace these?” I spent a lot of money on stainless steel at Larry’s place. On one particular April day, Larry showed me a “fastener test report,” and got to talking about metallurgy. That’s when a whole world opened up.
Jonathan Waldman
Like most people, I’d never thought about rust before. But like most journalists (I’d studied science journalism at Boston University), I knew how to pull on a thread. So off I went to a Navy conference called Mega Rust, where I met the nation’s highest-ranked rust official. In time, other people who fight rust took me from Deadhorse, Alaska, to Key West, Florida.
I had the luxury of cobbling together a book proposal while on a fellowship at the University of Colorado, and then the additional fortune of a grant from the Sloan Foundation, in support of the public understanding of science, to help me pull off my plan. That and an encouraging agent I found by scouring the acknowledgements pages of my favorite books. He found me a good publishing house with a sharp editor, who in turn knew where to snip my words.
I only wish I'd known sooner that a book — and all its length — could be so much more freeing than short magazine pieces. Even one that starts over nuts and bolts.
Contact info:
- Jonathan Waldman: jonnywaldman@gmail.com
- Waldman’s website: http://www.jonnywaldman.com
- Agent: Richard Morris, 212-421-1700, rmorris@janklow.com
- Publicist: Anne Tate Pearce, 212-698-7541, anne.pearce@simonandschuster.com
NASW members: Will your book be published soon? Take advantage of this opportunity for shameless self-promotion.
Tell your fellow NASW members how you came up with the idea for your book, developed a proposal, found an agent and publisher, funded and conducted research, and put the book together. Include what you wish you had known before you started this project, or had done differently.
See https://www.nasw.org/advance-copy-submission-guidelines.
Send info and images to Lynne Lamberg, NASW book editor, llamberg@nasw.org.
.png)
