4 ms·
Ask HN: Biographies of Companies or Things?
I've enjoyed books narrating the history of a company or a thing, like David McCullough's The Path Between the Seas, Jon Gertner's The Idea Factory or Dava Sobel's Longitude.
But, missing a name for this particular genre, I have a hard time finding new entries. Does HN have anything of that kind to recommend?
Other books I've found so far:
- Skunk Works by Ben E. Rich & Leo Janos
- The Box by Marc Levinson
- Apollo by Charles A Murray & Catherine Bly Cox
- The Great Bridge also by David McCullough
- karaterobot 4y agoMark Kurlansky has done a brisk business in this kind of biography-of-a-thing, Salt, and Cod were the first two books I thought of when I read your post, but he's also got books called Salmon and Paper that I haven't read. I think that I would put those books under the broad heading of social histories, which is a genre. You may also look for "microhistories", and here's a list of them: https://www.librarything.com/tag/microhistory https://www.librarything.com/tag/microhistory
- helph67 4y ago"Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age" April 2000 by Michael A. Hiltzik Publisher: Harper Business, ISBN:978-0-88730-989-2 See the description of the book here https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.5555/518513 https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.5555/518513
- caprock 4y agoThe Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder This is a fantastic book about the individuals and team building a machine at Data General around 1979.
- caprock 4y agoFor a nice collection of shorter stories, there's also: Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days Book by Jessica Livingston