Second Acts and our Paperback

With weary conviction, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote near the end of his life that "There are no second acts in American lives." He gets picked on a lot for that, mostly because it's an easy and somewhat eloquent introduction to the many stories that get written about second acts in American life. He also wrote that "All good writing is like swimming underwater and holding your breath." If that one is true, our resident wordsmith and editor-extraordinaire, Sally Haldorson, has been holding her breath for quite a while now, making her way through the upcoming paperback edition of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time.

It's the book's second act, and it has been reworked significantly with some additions we think you'll love. We're looking forward to the book's release later this year, but I'm sure we'll have to revisit it yet again for a third act someday, because business book publishing didn't stop after our book was finished and neither did the authors of the books that were chosen. And the authors aren't making future editions easier for us, either. They continue churning out wonderful new acts that add to the story and trajectory of their work.

Here is a list of the books coming out just this calender year from authors included in The 100 Best, along with the books that got them there:

• Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World by Michael Lewis, W.W. Norton & Company (author of Moneyball)
• That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back by Thomas L Friedman & Michael Mandelbaum, Farrar Straus Giroux (Friedman is the author of The Lexus and the Olive Tree)
• 3rd Alternative: Solving Life's Most Difficult Problems by Stephen R. Covey, Free Press (author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People)
• Escape Velocity: Free Your Company's Future from the Pull of the Past by Geoffrey A Moore, HarperBusiness (author of Crossing the Chasm)
• Infinite Possibility: Creating Customer Value on the Digital Frontier by B. Joseph Pine II & Kim C. Korn, Berrett-Koehler (Pine is the coauthor of The Experience Economy)
• Reach for the Skies: Ballooning, Birdmen, and Blasting Into Space by Richard Branson, Current (author of Losing My Virginity)
• Standout: The Groundbreaking New Strengths Assessment from the Leader of the Strengths Revolution by Marcus Buckingham, Thomas Nelson (coauthor of First, Break All the Rules)
• The MacKay MBA of Selling in the Real World by Harvey MacKay, Portfolio (author of Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive)
• Innovator's DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators by Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen & Clayton M Christensen, Harvard Business Review Press (Christensen is the author of The Innovator's Dilemma)
• Creative Thinkering: Putting Your Imagination to Work by Michael Michalko, New World Library (author of Thinkertoys)

And these are not just the second acts for most of these authors—this will be Michael Lewis's fourteenth book. With all of the great new authors entering the game today that we need to discover and read, this level of continued productivity and excellence seems almost unfair to our collective free time.