21 ms·

Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things

• hackernj 2y ago
  “West with the Night”, a memoir by Beryl Markham; she was the first person to fly across the Atlantic Ocean from east to west in a non-stop solo flight.
• zem 2y ago
  dava sobel's "longitude" is excellent
• bobheadmaker 2y ago
  You can find documentaries also on youtube, for example. There was one interesting about Dubai's development
  • jrflowers 2y ago
    “Check out something other than books” is a hilarious response to a request for book recommendations, though I would have included a specific example of a non-book, like “I see you mentioned private equity, have you listened to the songs of Jim Croce? He often writes about love and getting into bar fights, which are things that some people have difficulty with”
    • throwaway81523 2y ago
      I remember a few years ago Taylor Hawkins of the Foo Fighters rock band died unexpectedly and the cause of death was not immediately revealed. I was disappointed to learn sometime later that the cause had been heart failure. If I were a member of the Foo Fighters and had to die at the relatively early age of 50, of course I would have wanted it to be in a bar fight. Come to think of it, Bar Fighters might be a good name for a tribute band. So is starting a tribute rock band an ok alternative to reading books?
      • pjmorris 2y ago
        > So is starting a tribute rock band an ok alternative to reading books? That might depend on how you feel about 'Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991', which is a book about bands starting.
        • jrflowers 2y ago
          Instead of reading that book there is a painting called Smiling Girl, a Courtesan, Holding an Obscene Image by Gerard van Honthorst that’s worth checking out
  • aaron695 2y ago
    Extra points for not linking said docos. Creating an account to post this and this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42612506 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42612506, what's the game plan? Trying to pollute HN like TLAs did 4chan or just a misfiring brain? I'll call it aaron695s adage, it's now impossible to tell mental illness and TLAs apart on the internet.
• ahazred8ta 2y ago
  Exactly: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World http://www.simonwinchester.com/exactly http://www.simonwinchester.com/exactly Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_(book) Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38840.Boyd https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38840.Boyd
  • peterldowns 2y ago
    I'm extremely excited to read Exactly, thanks for the recommendation.
  • HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
    The thing about Boyd that really resonated with me was. 1) Realizing that he was better at something than everyone else around him. 2) Figuring out what it was that was making him better. 3) Reducing it to practice, so it could be taught to others and refined to become even better. Amazing story.
    • wbl 2y ago
      Boyd gets far too much credit for the F-16. If he had his way it wouldn't work at night or honestly at all in the face of the current threat environment.
      • ahazred8ta 2y ago
        The Day Fighter role https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_fighter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_fighter was viable for many decades and is still common in many non- first world countries. He invented the concept of maintaining low drag during high-G maneuvers.
    • __alexander 2y ago
      Boyd’s contributions might seem impressive but he seemed like a disgusting human being. He was confrontational, chewed his nails, smoked cigars, made his family live in a tiny apartment so he could be close to work, etc. I can’t remember it all but I quit reading his biography 3/4s in because he just sounded like horrendous person.
• peterldowns 2y ago
  I read these three books last year and I believe that each would be interesting to you: Undaunted Courage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undaunted_Courage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undaunted_Courage This is about doing something extremely hard with a huge amount of unknowns, and the type of person it takes to succeed. How Big Things Get Done https://www.amazon.com/How-Big-Things-Get-Done/dp/0593239512 https://www.amazon.com/How-Big-Things-Get-Done/dp/0593239512 This is about project planning and has plenty of real examples and case studies. The Education of Cyrus by Xenophon https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-the-education-of-cyrus-by https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-the-education-of-cyrus-b... This is the best book on leadership and teamwork that I've ever read. You can read this review instead but get a copy of the actual book, too, it's wonderful.
  • deanebarker 2y ago
    +1 for "How Big Things Get Done." Great book.
• iainmerrick 2y ago
  Janna Levin, Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space. It describes the construction of the LIGO experiment over a span of about 50 years. It does have a lot of character studies (one of Levin’s strengths) but also plenty of details about the incredible equipment and what it took to design it and put it all together.
• liendolucas 2y ago
  Digital Apollo by David A. Mindell. An excellent book that describes how the Apollo computer was developed. Dealers of Lighting Xerox Parc and the dawn of computer age by Michael A. Hiltzik. If you're interested in knowing where the PC as we know it today originated from. Others have already suggested The Dream Machine which was a book that once started I couldn't stop reading and finished it in about a week. Edit: Maybe not exactly the book that you might be interested in but I read Mindstorms by Papert and I think his work on education through the use of computers was groundbreaking. Very interesting book.
  • pjmorris 2y ago
    I'd add 'Sunburst and Luminary: An Apollo Memoir' [0], written by one of the LM guidance computer programmers, Don Eyles, to the Apollo reading list. [0] https://www.doneyles.com/LM/Tales.html https://www.doneyles.com/LM/Tales.html
• rasse 2y ago
  You might want to look into books about H. Tracy Hall. He's one of the inventors of lab-grown diamonds, the hardest things ever done.
• kristianc 2y ago
  Newton and the Counterfeiter https://www.royalmint.com/shop/books/Newton-and-the-Counterfeiter-by-Thomas-Levenson/ https://www.royalmint.com/shop/books/Newton-and-the-Counterf... Excellent book about Isaac Newton's role in solving the great recoinage crisis.
• snowwrestler 2y ago
  I greatly enjoyed The Leadership Moment by Michael Useem, which covers 9 stories of crises and how leaders approached them. The Man Who Discovered Quality by Andrea Gabor is an interesting story of W. Edwards Deming, the American who revolutionized post-WWII Japanese manufacturing with statistical approaches to reducing variance. Issac Newton by James Gleick conveys what it was like for Newton to essentially invent modern physical science in a pre-scientific world. Dreaming In Code by Scott Rosenberg is a good counterpoint to inspiring tech origin stories: legendary coders coming together to build an amazing product and… basically failing.
• timhigins 2y ago
  Vaccinated: One Man's Quest to Defeat the World's Deadliest Diseases Describes how Maurice Hilleman invented 40 vaccines, including for eight of the most common diseases in the US, over a 36 year career at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and Merck & Co. His vaccines are estimated to save 8 million lives each year.
• anteloper 2y ago
  The Wright Brothers biography was incredible. Highly recommend for the exact qualities you're looking for: the mechanics of how things that we take for granted actually got built and what the world they were made in was like
  • mkl 2y ago
    Which one, McCullough's? Your comment is the only search result for that quote.
• jtcond13 2y ago
  Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson
• uncomplexity_ 2y ago
  how to get rich by felix dennis is a banger for me
• tmsh 2y ago
  Re: getting hard things done I've been admiring the way Elon Musk takes calculated risks in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk_(Isaacson_book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk_(Isaacson_book)
• readyplayernull 2y ago
  The Soul of a New Machine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine
  • Rokesmith 2y ago
    Came here to say that.
  • padraigf 2y ago
    Yes, very memorable prologue: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Soul-New-Machine-Tracy-Kidder-ebook/dp/B00FOQS8AO?crid=30J8KOI7N697V&qid=1736495361&sr=8-1&asin=B00FOQS8AO&revisionId=6d7d2d38&format=1&depth=1 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Soul-New-Machine-Tracy-Kidder-ebook...
  • markus_zhang 2y ago
    This is a good one. I read it twice just to experience the 70-80s development atmosphere. The daughter of Tom West did complain on Reddit a few years ago that Tom neglected them during the period, but I still admire such personality. The same admiration goes to David Cutler in "Showstopper".
    • ghaff 2y ago
      Tom was very intense. Dotted line worked for him for a while. Latterly he had an internet-related effort that didn't pan out (welcome to the crowd) but also was fairly instrumental in CLARiiON RAID disk arrays and an early NUMA architecture, neither of which ultimately saved Data General but probably helped keep it running for longer than it otherwise would have.
  • adamc 2y ago
    This is the best non-fiction book I have ever read. It's great simply as a piece of writing -- and the story it tells is an interesting one. I liked it enough that after I listened to it on Audible I went out and bought a hardback version to re-read. That almost never happens.
  • Gooblebrai 2y ago
• rednafi 2y ago
  “South: The Story of Shackleton’s Last Expedition, 1914–1917” by Sir Ernest Shackleton. Here, Shackleton documents the journey of the Endurance expedition, which aimed to traverse Antarctica but instead became a legendary tale of survival after the ship was trapped and destroyed by pack ice.
  • RGamma 2y ago
    I haven't verified the info in this video myself, but it's making a point about Shackleton actually being somewhat incompetent/overeager and getting himself and crew into more trouble than necessary (as compared to Amundsen): https://youtube.com/watch?v=DU06c7f9fzc https://youtube.com/watch?v=DU06c7f9fzc (TED talk, sorry)
    • carlosjobim 2y ago
      You have a mistaken perspective on the whole thing. These men were seafaring adventurers, not people who will call their lawyer if there isn't a gluten free option in their restaurant. Every crew member was fully informed that they were more likely to die than survive the journey – before even sending in their applications. And Shackleton is dead since long, so you can't cancel him anymore.
    • tamersalama 2y ago
      I'm currently listening to "Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing". I've also heard of some of the arguments against Shackleton (I haven't watched the talk). I have to think of what Shackleton, as a leader (boss), was going through and with uncertainties abound. 28 people who he hired based not only on capability alone, but also for crew (team) fit. He apparently cared deeply for them, and they in-turn cared for one another. They managed to work together in the harshest of environments. They all made it. That in and of itself, is a remarkable feat.
    • guappa 2y ago
      I'd say Scott was the most incompetent of the lot. At least according to https://www.amazon.com/Scott-Amundsen-Last-Place-Earth/dp/0349113955 https://www.amazon.com/Scott-Amundsen-Last-Place-Earth/dp/03...
• anfractuosity 2y ago
  I rather liked 'The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation'
  • Blackstrat 2y ago
    Agreed. Just finished it a couple of weeks ago. Hackers by Levy and fire in the Valley may also fit the bill.
• dyingkneepad 2y ago
  > hard things How about consistently competing at fighting video-games at the highest level in the world for more than 30 years? "The Will to Keep Winning", by Daigo Umehara. He was the first Street Fighter 2 player to reach the top (being considered either the best player or top 3), and he was able to stay at the stop since then. No other video-game player has ever been so consistently good as Daigo. He may not have won many EVO or Capcom Cup titles, but he has always stayed at the top. And he's the protagonist of Evo Moment 37. Also, his story is good. The book may make you cry. And it's a very short book.
• willmarch 2y ago
  Freedom's Forge
  • jamestimmins 2y ago
    Second this. It do a great job explaining how the WW2 armament buildup required both legislative and mindset changes on behalf of the government about what a good working relationship between business and government looked like. 10/10 book.
• antisthenes 2y ago
  I haven't personally read it, but The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes seems to fit the bill.
• teleforce 2y ago
  Richard Hamming's book on AT&T Bell Labs R&D culture in inventing and solving many of the important problems [1]. Another is Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner on the early days of the Internet [2]. [1] The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: https://press.stripe.com/the-art-of-doing-science-and-engineering https://press.stripe.com/the-art-of-doing-science-and-engine... [2] Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet: https://katiehafner.com/books-new/where-wizards-stay-up-late/ https://katiehafner.com/books-new/where-wizards-stay-up-late...
  • lnwlebjel 2y ago
    The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner is similarly great for some of the earlier/origin stories of Bell Labs.
• marcklingen 2y ago
  The Innovators, Walter Isaacson It’s interesting to read how many individuals contributed in all sorts of important ways in the history of computing.
• beAbU 2y ago
  How to Make a Spaceship by Julian Guthrie was a greally good read for me.
• zetazzed 2y ago
  The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes! Lots of detail, but it also shows how many geniuses it took working over years to really make it work.
  • deaddodo 2y ago
    And, as added reading, The Radioactive Boy Scout. Just for a perspective on how abundant and readily available that information had become in academia a few decades later.
    • HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
      Loved that book!
  • pjmorris 2y ago
    Hearty agreement. One of the best books I've read.
  • pauldix 2y ago
    Second this one, it's incredible in the level of research and detail.
  • DashAnimal 2y ago
    One of the greatest books I've ever read. It is long and took me a couple of months to absorb this one, but in return the amount of detail is staggering and it never ever felt like it got boring or tedious or overstayed it's welcome.
  • searine 2y ago
    This was a life-changing book for me.
• tuetnsuppe 2y ago
  Failure is not an Option by Gene Kranz, Flight Director of Apollo 11 and Apollo 13 among other missions give a lot of insight into the preparation and focus of safety critical operations.
• cl42 2y ago
  "The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York" by Robert Caro This is an incredibly long biography of a man who figured out how to build an urban empire. While he wasn't an "entrepreneur" per se, he figured out how to generate huge amounts of revenue via tolls/bridges, how to manage and manipulate public policy, and how to attract the best urban planning talent. ... and you can then read about how it all fell apart. Regardless of your opinion on Robert Moses / NYC, it's an incredibly fascinating read or (~90-hour) audio book.
  • jbullock35 2y ago
    The Power Broker is a superb choice for OP. This comment should be closer to the top of the thread.
  • squeedles 2y ago
    Absolutely also recommend! Took a while to get through it but Moses figured out how to hack government and civil engineering projects. He literally changed the New York State constitution, used bond contracts to build a defensive barrier around himself, and for better or worse then built half of the public works projects in the US himself or through his disciples.
  • _aavaa_ 2y ago
    99% invisible recently did it as a book club. You can listen to a much shorter chapter-by-chapter summary and discussion about it: https://99percentinvisible.org/club/ https://99percentinvisible.org/club/
  • gainda 2y ago
    second this: i was trying to follow along with the 99 percent invisible book club but i fell behind due to life events. i picked it back up during the holidays with about 25% left to go. Caro does an amazing job writing in an engaging, compelling way about topics that would otherwise feel dry coming from a different writer. i look forward to getting into his LBJ books in the future.
  • dayvid 2y ago
    This is a top answer. Robert Caro goes into excruciating detail on how he accomplished most public works projects. I especially appreciate him covering the grey or dark sides of getting deals done as most really hard things have some unpleasant sides to them.
• gantron 2y ago
  I really enjoyed American Prometheus. Might be a bit too focused on Oppenheimer for the original request, but it covers the Manhattan Project more broadly too.
• mitchbob 2y ago
  The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop [1]. An in-depth history of how personal computing was created. [1] https://press.stripe.com/the-dream-machine https://press.stripe.com/the-dream-machine
• hashishen 2y ago
  moonwalking with Einstein is about a man who decides to get into memory competitions upon learning it's more skill based than he realized. this in turn helped me develop more confidence in my own abilities with day to day routine and not be afraid to try new things i never considered myself naturally good at
  • ppsreejith 2y ago
    Great book! IIRC, after attending the 2005 USA memory championships as a journalist, he became intrigued and started training and in one year became USA Memory champion in 2006 at age 24 I'd tried applying memory training lessons from this book a few years ago and written about my experience: http://web.archive.org/web/20210301185111/https://ppsreejith.net/posts/memory-training-and-sania-mirza/ http://web.archive.org/web/20210301185111/https://ppsreejith...
• abtinf 2y ago
  The Box by Marc Levinson is the incredible story of the dawn of containerized shipping. It is a little shocking just how recently this happened (the very first experimental loads were in the 1950s), and that the standard of shipping before containers was for longshoremen to literally hand carry boxes of stuff onto ships and stuff them just anywhere. You would be stunned to realize just how new and unused the piers of San Francisco really are, because they were built with massive government subsidies at exactly the wrong time. The book covers the courageous people involved, the political and economic impacts, and how the industry truly found its footing prioritizing absolutely reducing operational costs over all other concerns (like delivery speed).
  • riffraff 2y ago
    I second this recommendation of a fantastic book, mildly inconvenienced by the author delving into _very specific details_, like whole paragraphs of different sizes of locks that felt like line noise to me. It also offers a very interesting perspective on the fears of the AI/automation craze, like, what happened to whole towns of dock workers who used to manually pack goods in round-hulled ships and got replaced by a single machine moving a container on a flat ship. Still, I'm not sure it's exactly "people who did hard things" as much as the story of decades-long incremental changes brought by a bunch of people.
  • WillAdams 2y ago
    Also research the development of the pallet and the pallet jack, which had similar effects.
  • OxfordOutlander 2y ago
    +1 Fantastic book. Particularly the impact it had on the vietnam war, and the role the battles between rail + trucking played in driving containers.
• ackbar03 2y ago
  If you want more entrepreneurial type stories. When the heavens went on sale, by Ashly Vance, is pretty good. It details the early days of the space start-ups other than spaceX The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley is also pretty good, describes the crazy days of early paypal. Someone already mentioned Liftoff by Erig Berger. Starting a private space company is probably as hard as things get, and it describes the early days pretty well
  • juliend2 2y ago
    Her biography on Elon Musk is also pretty good as far as depicting someone who did hard things. I was quite impressed by his tenacity.
• GlennFarrant 2y ago
  Apollo: The Race To The Moon Charles Murray, Catherine Bly Cox My favorite book of this type by far.
  • pjmorris 2y ago
    I came to recommend this as well. It's a study of the engineering and management efforts behind Apollo, and much more interesting and entertaining than that makes it sound. The section on how they developed the F-1 engines that powered the first stage of the Saturn V, including how they'd explode bombs inside the engine nozzle to be sure that it could cope with instabilities, is just one of dozens (hundreds?) of examples of how all the small pieces came together to accomplish their priorities, 'Man. Moon. Decade.' An amazing book.
• hoytech 2y ago
  The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error That Transformed the World by Ken Alder These guys went through quite some hardships to define the length of a meter. Good read!
• bwb 2y ago
  Out of the Shadows By Jonathan Kingsman https://shepherd.com/book/out-of-the-shadows https://shepherd.com/book/out-of-the-shadows Amazing book about the grain markets and how they have changed over the last 40 years. "Once shadowy figures, grain merchants have now come out of the shadows. Almost everything that you eat or drink today will contain something bought, stored, transported, processed, shipped, distributed or sold by one of the seven giants of the agricultural supply chain. The media often refers to them as the ABCD group of international grain-trading companies, with ABCD standing for ADM, Bunge, Cargill and Dreyfus. The acronym, though, ignores the other three giants of the food supply: Glencore, COFCO International and Wilmar. Together, they handle 50 percent of the international trade in grain and oilseeds. In this book’s series of exclusive and unprecedented interviews, CEOs and senior traders from these seven giants describe in their own words how the agricultural markets are changing, and how they are adapting to those changes." The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket By Benjamin Lorr https://shepherd.com/book/the-secret-life-of-groceries https://shepherd.com/book/the-secret-life-of-groceries Five years of research really explains large swaths of our food system and how it changes what we eat. You might like these as well: The best unexpectedly enthralling books about seemingly boring things https://shepherd.com/best-books/good-books-about-seemingly-boring-things https://shepherd.com/best-books/good-books-about-seemingly-b... The best books that make sense of how globalization broke down, and what happens next https://shepherd.com/best-books/globalization-breaks-down-what-happens-next https://shepherd.com/best-books/globalization-breaks-down-wh... *Features The Big Rig, a book about the American trucking industry and it's breakdown Some good ones in there :)
  • icelancer 2y ago
    Almost no one thinks about the modern miracle that are grocery stores. It wasn't that long ago that getting out-of-season produce was literally impossible. Today, you just put up with inferior tomatoes in the winter and be annoyed about it. The logistical complications of worldwide produce supply chains and your local supermarkets are really, really nuts.
    • niels_bom 2y ago
      I think most people don’t have access to supermarkets tho.
• purple-leafy 2y ago
  https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/124718.One_Man_s_Wilderness https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/124718.One_Man_s_Wildern...
• throwaway81523 2y ago
  QED And The Men Who Made It, by Sylvan S. Schweber. About the development of quantum electrodynamics. It is partly biography, centering on Freeman Dyson, Richard Feynman, Julian Schwinger, and Sin-Itoro Tomonaga in roughly decreasing order of word count by rough recollection. Mostly I'd say the subject matter is history of physics from a fairly hardcore technical perspective. Tbh I didn't understand that much of the physics, though I learned some through reading. The history and biography parts were quite engaging anyway.
• rcarmo 2y ago
  Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants - is a pretty great read, full of (literally) explosive twists.
  • JoshTriplett 2y ago
    Seconding this! It has great detail on the actual rocket fuel chemistry, alongside incredibly well-told stories and anecdotes. Many people's favorite line from it: > It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that’s the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water-with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals-steel, copper, aluminium, etc.-because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminium keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.
    • rcarmo 2y ago
      Oh man. I remember laughing out loud at “It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers” and then hooting at the end of that paragraph.
• noufalibrahim 2y ago
  One of the "hard things" I've come across was turn of the century explorations. The stories of polar explorers like Ernest Shackleton (chronicled in Lansing's Endurance) or tropical ones like "River of Doubt" detailing Roosevelt's exploration of the Amazon tributary are fascinating stories of how people's grit accomplished hard things.
  • matrix2596 2y ago
    i understand polar expeditions, but werent people already living in amazon
    • vasco 2y ago
      Do you have a recommendation of a book written by them?
      • fauria 2y ago
        The letters from Francisco de Orellana: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_de_Orellana https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_de_Orellana https://en.scribd.com/document/647918681/The-Voyage-of-Francisco-de-Orellana https://en.scribd.com/document/647918681/The-Voyage-of-Franc...
      • ghostthunder 2y ago
        River of Doubt - Candice Millard https://www.candicemillard.com/river-of-doubt.html https://www.candicemillard.com/river-of-doubt.html Covers Teddy Roosevelt's Amazon expedition. To the comment about "weren't people living in the Amazon" - read the book. The Brazilian government was scouting and mapping the terrain for the project of connecting the coasts with telegraph lines. This was uncharted territory and the chance of not returning was high. I cannot recommend enough.
    • noufalibrahim 2y ago
      The "Rio da Dúvida" was a tributary which wasn't really mapped at the time. The Brazilian government was laying out Telegraph lines at the time to map the area. There were tribals in the area but it wasn't mapped.
• db48x 2y ago
  The _Path Between the Seas_ by David McCullough is really excellent. It starts with the French diplomat Ferdinand De Lesseps, specifically with the way his friendship with the king of Egypt enabled him to start the Suez canal project. It then details how he got the Isthmian Canal project off the ground and how, because he wasn’t an engineer, he became willfully blind to the realities in Panama. He made horrendously flawed plans (a sea-level canal through a mountain range, to be dug below the level of a massive river that flooded every year…), completely ignored all of the massive problems facing his company, and made press releases about how well everything was going right up until the day before the company was finally bankrupt. As a result, none of those huge problems got solved. When the Americans finally stepped in 15 years later, they too made the mistake of appointing bureaucrats to run the project. The result was a shambles. Eventually President Roosevelt simply ignored Congress and appointed an individual to run the project. He was a railroad engineer named Stevens. Stevens was the first to realize that the real logistical problem to solve was not actually digging up the dirt, but disposing of it. The French had famously used steam shovels to dig the canal as fast as possible, just as they had in Suez. But once the dirt was loaded into train cars and carted away from the dig site, they used teams of men with shovels to empty them. Stevens calculated how fast the dirt would need to be loaded and unloaded, and set up a system of trains that could carry any quantity of dirt any distance, while loading as quickly as possible at the dig site and unloading it just as quickly at the dump site. Once he knew the numbers and had the system built, he could track exactly how quickly each train was unloaded and know which teams were working efficiently and which needed training to avoid falling behind. Another good one by the same author is _The Wright Brothers_. It’s shorter and perhaps not as detailed as _The Path Between the Seas_ (but then it only took them 4 years while the canal needed 33), but it focuses on the actual tasks undertaken by the Wrights as they developed their first few airplanes. They first used gliders to test their wings and the control mechanisms. Then they built a wind tunnel to get accurate data about the lift and drag of a wing under specific circumstances. Then they built an engine lighter than any in use at the time. They designed their own propellers too, since nobody they talked to knew how to design one. Even for boats, the engineers who designed them just used heuristics and guesses and rules of thumb rather than any scientific processes in their work. The first few propeller shafts that they built turned out not to be strong enough and were destroyed. But they were methodical and driven, so they solved each problem one at a time until they had both a working airplane and a working knowledge of how to fly it.
• asdfman123 2y ago
  The Caro books on the LBJ presidency are incredible biographies. LBJ did crazy things to get where he got.
  • pjmorris 2y ago
    I've only read the first of Caro's LBJ biographies, 'The Path to Power', but I'd very much agree. I plan to read one annually, but last year's Caro was 'The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.' How Moses acquired the power (genius, legislation, money and, through them, influence) to physically reshape New York City and State seems pretty relevant to understanding how things work today. I consider Caro's short book, 'Working', a gateway drug for the longer books.
    • asdfman123 2y ago
      I just finished the first and I'm halfway through the second one, Means of Ascent. It's granted a little slower than the first. It helps to listen to them as audiobooks because I can play them at the gym or something or on my commute and don't have to get too focused on the details.
• f2000 2y ago
  Copies in Seconds: Chester Carlson and the Birth of the Xerox Machine by David Owen "A history of the photocopier offers a portrait of reserved physics graduate Chester Carlson, who invented the copier to ease his job as a patent clerk and who saw his marketing efforts daunted by numerous rejections, before the head of Xerox research recognized the machine's potential. "
• shivaraj1996 2y ago
  "Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX" by Eric Berger documents how SpaceX employees poured their blood, sweat, and tears into launching a cost-effective rocket at a time when legacy operators dominated the space market with their costly cost-plus-fee contracts. This book mostly follows the journey of employees and (thankfully) doesn't resolve to Elon praise too much. There is a continuation to this book called "Reentry" but I haven't read it yet.
  • sien 2y ago
    I've just read both and highly recommend them and was coming in to this thread to do so. Liftoff : https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/53402132-liftoff https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/53402132-liftoff Re-entry : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/205309521-reentry https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/205309521-reentry Both have very high ratings on Goodreads.
• austin-cheney 2y ago
  > Less interested in people and character studies. If you don’t want examples then all you need to know is velocity. The Y Combinator people call it doing things that don’t scale. Here is how it works for absolutely anything: 1. Get the right tools in place. This is an intrinsic capability set you have to build. People tend to fail here most frequently and hope some framework or copy/paste of a library will just do it for them. Don’t be some worthless pretender. Know your shit from experience so you can execute with confidence. 2. Build a solid foundation. This will require a lot of trial and error plus several rounds of refactoring because you need some idea of the edge cases and where you the pain points are. You will know it when you have it because it’s highly durable and requires less of everything compared to the alternatives. A solid foundation isn’t a thing you sell. It’s your baseline for doing everything else at low cost. 3. Create tests. These should be in writing but they don’t have to be. You need a list of known successes and failures ready to apply at everything new. There are a lot of whiners that are quick to cry about how something can’t be done. Fuck those guys and instead try it to know exactly what more it takes to get done. 4. Finally, measure things. It is absolutely astonishing that most people cannot do this at all. It looks amazing when you see it done well and this is ultimately what separates the adults from the children. This is where velocity comes from because you will know exactly how much faster you are compared to where you were. If you aren’t intimately aware of your performance in numbers from a variety of perspectives you aren’t more special than anyone else. People who accomplish hard things are capable of doing those because they didn’t get stuck. They had the proper tools in place to manipulate their environment, redefine execution (foundation), objectively determine what works without guessing, and then know how much to tweak it moving forward.
  • random3 2y ago
    Not bad advice, but the ask was for books - do you have any?
    • austin-cheney 2y ago
      No, the only real answer to this is character studies the op did not want those I won’t recommend them.
  • 2y ago
• riffraff 2y ago
  not sure it's a story of "people doing hard things" but it may go your way for "mechanics of how things that we take for granted actually got built", the book is "Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk" > a comprehensive history of man's efforts to understand risk and probability, from ancient gamblers in Greece to modern chaos theory. In some parts it's not an easy read, but the underlying stories are very interesting.
  • llamaimperative 2y ago
    Agreed not sure it exactly fits the prompt but this is a really fascinating book. One of those things where I didn’t fully bring into conscious awareness until reading it: statistics are tools that didn’t always exist, and had to be developed alongside multiple philosophical revolutions.
• 9dev 2y ago
  Even if it probably isn’t exactly what you were looking for, I’d wholeheartedly recommend The Spy and the Traitor by Ben McIntyre, documenting the story of Oleg Gordievsky, the soviet spy that crossed over to the MI5 during the Cold War. It gave me a glimpse into the secret war at the time, the stuff that inspired James Bond, and the hardships and permanent threat faced by a spy trying to live several lives at once. It was one hell of a read.
  • FinnLobsien 2y ago
    All of the author's books are great imo. If you like cold war spy stories, you'd also enjoy Billion Dollar Spy.
  • danieloj 2y ago
    Agreed, this is probably the most gripping non-fiction I've ever read
• WalterBright 2y ago
  "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" Rhodes
• solumos 2y ago
  This is a more broad interpretation of "getting things done," but The Secret Race is an excellent book about what it was like to be a professional cyclist in the late 90s/early 2000s, doping and all
• sharpshadow 2y ago
  Back then I’ve got my hands on a book about the history of low temperature research in German but unfortunately I can’t find it anymore. I would say “Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold” would be a fitting match. The history to get to absolut zero kelvin would fit your description.
• DarknessFalls 2y ago
  Do anthropomorphic trains count? The Little Engine That Could.
  • xxr 2y ago
    https://youtu.be/0T7huuYNEBA https://youtu.be/0T7huuYNEBA
• JudeFawley 2y ago
  "Red Moon Rising" by Matthew Brzezinski, it tells the story of the Sputnik programme and is just really very well written.
• sebstefan 2y ago
  "Outliers: The Story of Success" by Malcolm Gladwell but it's more centered on the mechanics that made successful people able to do the hard things. It does case studies on others that failed as well.
• simon_acca 2y ago
  Cool question! Patrick Collison (of stripe fame) put together a collection of historical ambitious projects that got done quickly, look into the biographies of people mentioned in there. https://patrickcollison.com/fast https://patrickcollison.com/fast
• saltserv 2y ago
  [dead]
• stereobit 2y ago
  The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914
  • idlewords 2y ago
    Came here to post this same book.
• iancmceachern 2y ago
  The chariots of apollo
• alexpogosyan 2y ago
  Eccentric Orbits: The Iridium Story Book about Dan Colussy, who somehow managed to rescue Iridium satellite network when it was weeks away from bankruptcy and being deliberately crashed into the ocean.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• master-lincoln 2y ago
  The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn showing how Stalin operated and how imprisoned people survived is a good read about humans doing hard things.
• afandian 2y ago
  I find reading books about how people did hard things to be very motivating and therapeutic, especially when facing a difficult task myself! I’ve enjoyed all of these; they were all recommendations from HN. Showstopper - Windows NT Losing the Signal - BlackBerry Made in Japan - Sony Piloting Palm - Palm Sweating Bullets - PowerPoint Folklore.org - Early Apple. The “Mac Folklore Radio Podcast” [0]. Has a few interesting stories of people innovating and solving challenges. [0] https://macfolkloreradio.com/ https://macfolkloreradio.com/
  • markus_zhang 2y ago
    Showstopper is a must read for anyone who is interested in living a pure engineering life. David Cutler is one of my heroes and I'll quote: "What I really wanted to do was work on computers, not apply them to problems" I'd also recommend listening to his interviews on YouTube. There are two long interviews, one by David's Garage and the other by CHM. Both very long and inspiring so I keep going back to them when I'm driving.
    • ghaff 2y ago
      If we're recommending Showstopper (which I do), I'd add Soul of a New Machine about Data General, where I worked for many years--but a bit later.
      • markus_zhang 2y ago
        I have read that too, twice. I love the part that they talked about the microcode, and all others too. Maybe you should write a post about your experience too :) I'm sure it's going to be a blast to read.
        • ghaff 2y ago
          As I say, I was a bit later--mid-eighties--but I knew Jim Guyer who was one of the microkids as I recall. Helped setup an interview for Command Line Heroes podcast. Do need to get back into writing. Next week. Really.
• begueradj 2y ago
  "The Soul of a New Machine", by Tracy Kidder.
• FinnLobsien 2y ago
  Robert Kurson's diving books (Shadow Divers and Pirate Hunters) are some of the best books on startups I've ever read. They're stories about some of the most ambitious wreck divers out there. It might not seem analogous, but there's a lot of parallels, i.e. you have limited air (aka runway), you need to choose the people on your expedition wisely and can't bring too many, you need to be extremely ambitious (seeking more than just touristy diving), etc. The writing is incredible, too.
• tompccs 2y ago
  "Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II" Covers the invention of radar, "big science", involvement in the Manhattan project. https://www.amazon.com/Tuxedo-Park-Street-Science-Changed/dp/0684872889/ref=sr_1_1?crid=VEKDM989KV45&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.aVmk36eHgasTij_Xoq_xAkwziiK8I4mC15_WWiS3-xGmlCC-QEae0sAt8yAkaqKQ.UcRcBFmYUVZVJz3PtCTVh984BArHcP882zQXwzmrH6Y&dib_tag=se&keywords=Tuxedo+Park%3A+A+Wall+Street+Tycoon+and+the+Secret+Palace+of+Science+That+Changed+the+Course+of+World+War+II&qid=1736504262&s=books&sprefix=tuxedo+park+a+wall+street+tycoon+and+the+secret+palace+of+science+that+changed+the+course+of+world+war+ii%2Cstripbooks-intl-ship%2C115&sr=1-1 https://www.amazon.com/Tuxedo-Park-Street-Science-Changed/dp... "Insisting On the Impossible : The Life of Edwin Land (inventor of instant photography and founder of Polarioid)" Probably one of the most brilliant commercial technology breakthroughs largely attributable to a single team and a singular vision. Steve Jobs' hero. https://www.amazon.com/Insisting-Impossible-Life-Edwin-Land/dp/0738201901 https://www.amazon.com/Insisting-Impossible-Life-Edwin-Land/...
• fhe 2y ago
  Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology (goodreads link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/809315.Making_PCR https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/809315.Making_PCR) for a short video version of this history, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaXKQ70q4KQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaXKQ70q4KQ from Veritasium. reasons for recommendation: - it's an example in the biological science, to complement the heavy representation of examples from computer science and entrepreneurship in this thread - the main character, Kary Mullis, is colorful and controversial. Not a likable individual, but nevertheless had traits (mostly an unreasonable obsession) that enabled him to make such a discovery - the discovery of high temperature tolerant enzymes predated Mullis' insight by some two decades, and it played a key role in making PCR practical and widely applicable. this is a pattern I have seen often in major inventions, which were made possible by prior discoveries (often decades old) which lay dormant until someone put everything together. This process of re-discovering the pieces and making connections is also where I think machine learning could be particularly helpful. In fact this is my main motivation for picking up this book (by online reviews, not a particularly well-written one).
• mangeshm 2y ago
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• jll29 2y ago
  Reading some of these books recommended here, perhaps the most shocking thing is that so much is due to randomness: an arbitrary person does something small that turns out to be on the critical path, and without it the big thing would not get completed. I like the kind of books recommended here, but please be aware of survivor's bias (there not many books about failures! Any great recommendations? "How we could NOT get back to the moon again", "Recall: Toyota hits the breaks", "Last fag: how big tobacco lost against a Minneapolis law firm" ;-) and the fact that the winner gets to write the history. For example, next month, Bill Gates new memoir "Source Code" will come out, the first of three planned autobiographical books, and I doubt he will share with us how he strongarmed PC manufacturers into shipping Windows pre-installed in order to get the OS monopoly and other important events.
  • mmkos 2y ago
    That's my problem with a lot of the literature on building successful businesses. They all seem to be offering a white glove path and don't talk about all the tactics ranging from shady to downright illegal that helped many of the biggest companies today to be where they are now.
    • gamebak 2y ago
      I share your thoughts. Sometimes you just need to be at the right place, at the right time, solving the exact problem and this is troublesome, especially in this era when so much is already invented. Maybe I just have a wrong view, but I don't know how to decouple from this.
      • withinboredom 2y ago
        The fact that capitalism can be modeled by pure random chance only drives the point home, in my opinion. So much depends on luck... That being said, luck can be engineered, to a degree: - meeting people; networking - having access to resources - recognizing potential opportunities and taking advantage of them That being said, I'm by no means "successful" but I'm also not a "failure" ... I win some, and I lose some.
• ned99 2y ago
  The Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan is a nice read. You can learn critical thinking from this book.
• matt_j 2y ago
  Carrying The Fire by Michael Collins is an excellent account of Apollo 11 from the perspective of the command module pilot. I've read it three times, it's a wonderful book, he's a very intelligent, capable and humble man.
  • giraffe_lady 2y ago
    This book completely changed my understanding of how that era of space projects was developed. Before reading it I didn't know how involved the early astronauts were in actually developing the systems, spacecraft, and procedures. As test pilots they were extremely competent technicians obviously, but they were expected to develop in novel individual domains to solve previously unexplored problems. By the end of gemini the first two dozen astronauts were each among a handful of world experts in their focus: things like orbital rendezvous mechanics, navigation, interface design, biomechanics of flight, radio telemetry. The program wasn't built for them to fly, to a huge extent they guided how it was built.
• andrepd 2y ago
  Damn, I must confess when I read the title I thought you meant things like war, or scientific inventions, or historical political events. Turns out you meant private equity and Texas oil x)
• dead_gunslinger 2y ago
  [dead]
• oliwary 2y ago
  I really enjoyed the book "iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It", which not only talks about the beginning of Apple and computers in general, but also gives a fascinating insight into the character of Steve Wozniak. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/798635.iWoz https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/798635.iWoz
• Over2Chars 2y ago
  Your title says "people who did hard things" then you say "less interested in people..." It sounds like you want second hand accounts of the events or groups that occurred around "hard things". Like a description of NASA going to the moon, but not the accounts of a particular astronaut. What is a "hard thing"?
• BiteCode_dev 2y ago
  The road to character. It's a great reality check, poking into human nature, morality, suffering, all with real life examples and littlz tolerance for bullshit without delusion of grandeur.
• Jugglernaut 2y ago
  [dead]
• fsloth 2y ago
  “Walt Disney” by Neal Gabler. The man was reinventing himself through his life. Disney is sort nowadays stereotypical corporate americana but by god, it actually was started by the whims, passion, skill & vision of Walt. A must read imo to anyone interested in creation and building.
  • ErigmolCt 2y ago
    Walt Disney's story was always fascinating for me! How one person's vision could shape an entire industry and cultural legacy
• SeriousGamesKit 2y ago
  I'd suggest 'The Rickover Effect' by Theodore Rockwell. The author gives a firsthand account of what it was like to be part of the teams who created the first nuclear-powered submarine and civilian nuclear power plant (perhaps counterintuitively, in that order). There is a fair amount of discussion about people, culture and leadership, but it is very grounded and very detailed about the mechanics of what went into these projects and how the former made the latter possible.
• squeedles 2y ago
  “Across The Airless Wilds” by Eric Swift. Tells the story of how the moon buggy came to be and how it was contracted and built in 18 months. Fascinating deep dive into what it actually took to make that work on the moon. https://www.harpercollins.com/products/across-the-airless-wilds-earl-swift?variant=39727660793890 https://www.harpercollins.com/products/across-the-airless-wi... He also wrote a book on the interstate highway system called The Big Roads which was interesting but not as much of a page turner.
  • squeedles 2y ago
    Sorry, Earl Swift, not Eric
• alentred 2y ago
  I think that "people who did hard things" fall on a spectrum between these two extremities: - someone who got lucky - someone who invested an unfathomable amount of time to their craftsmanship or to their beliefs Of course it is not black and white, and even luck mostly requires hard work in the first place, which I admire (and if you find your luck - hold to it!, nothing wrong with that), but you get the gist. I guess that in other words what I am saying is: beware of the survivorship bias on the left side of this spectrum. -- Finally, the book: "The story of my experiments with Truth", Ghandi. Definitely belongs to the "work hard" extremity and a very interesting read; but I don't want to create an impression that I find it special in any way because of my above comment, it is just one of the latest I have read, consider the two comments unrelated.
  • ryandrake 2y ago
    The books about people who did hard things and spent an unfathomable amount of time on them, but failed and never became known for anything--generally don't get written. It's hard for me to take any "hard work success story" as prescriptive. It's mostly survivorship bias.
• SanjayMehta 2y ago
  The Six Mountain Travel Books by Eric Shipton.
• somenameforme 2y ago
  "The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch" [1] is an amazing read. It's a mix of history and how-to describing how (and when.. which is often extremely surprising) developed the technology that we have, and how it might be recreated starting from scratch. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Knowledge:_How_to_Rebuild_Our_World_from_Scratch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Knowledge:_How_to_Rebuild_...
• commondream 2y ago
  The Making of the Atomic Bomb is one I read recently and really enjoyed. I didn’t love the writing, but thought Skunkworks was full of good stories. It is a little more character study but Dealers of Lightning is a good one. I also enjoyed The Idea Factory. And last, a little off the path of making things but Endurance was a good read.
• protocolture 2y ago
  To avoid some survivorship bias and maybe offer something you wont find other recommending. Gamasutra used to offer these amazing post mortems written up by game developers after shipping a product. Often recounting all their failures and how they still shipped.
  • alecco 2y ago
    Good idea. * "Billion Dollar Loser" by Reeves Wiedeman (WeWork) * "Bad Blood" by John Carreyrou (Theranos) * "Losing My Virginity" by Richard Branson (his failed projects) * "The Hard Thing About Hard Things" by Ben Horowitz
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• zikduruqe 2y ago
  Surviving a concentration camp seems a tad difficult. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man's_Search_for_Meaning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man's_Search_for_Meaning Everyone should read this at least twice in their lives.
  • redditf1 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • Swenrekcah 2y ago
      Do you mean the Holodomor famine? In any case it seems you should be the one to recommend a book on the subject.
  • lnsru 2y ago
    Another book about survival there: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_of_the_Gods https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_of_the_Gods When I have a bad day I think about this book and intellectuals in hell.
  • sreeramvenkat 2y ago
    Read it as if you are reading it the second time.
  • brainzap 2y ago
    I am not reading it
    • itisit 2y ago
      Perhaps you should.
  • ckmate-king-2 2y ago
    One of the most famous accounts, also universally acclaimed, is Primo Levi's Survival at Auschwitz. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/22/primo-levi-auschwitz-if-this-is-a-man-memoir-70-years https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/22/primo-levi-aus...
• rottc0dd 2y ago
  I really "Idea Man" by Paul Newman. Though survivorship bias is apparent, it was insightful read on how Apple an Msft came to be and why they are what they are. For example, why closed system was important and worked for Apple. It was great read until he leaves Microsoft.
  • jdeibele 2y ago
    "Idea Man" is by Paul Allen. "The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man: A Memoir" looks like an interesting book on Paul Newman but I haven't read it.
  • rottc0dd 2y ago
    Too late to edit. Paul Allen it is
• HenryBemis 2y ago
  Every few years I re-read Homer - Odyssey. And maybe the threats/challenges aren't the same, but.. they are.
• crones 2y ago
  Based on what you said you have enjoyed already, I'd highly recommend "A Triumph of Genius: Edwin Land, Polaroid and the Kodak Patent War" by Ronald K. Fierstein (http://www.triumphofgenius.com/ http://www.triumphofgenius.com/). It is a history of Land and Polaroid, together with a detailed, insider's view of the long-running litigation between Polaroid and Kodak (the author worked at the firm which represented Polaroid on the case). One of the things I found most interesting was just how much Steve Jobs was inspired by and copied Edwin Land.
  • busyant 2y ago
    I was a postdoc at Land's research institute (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rowland_Institute_at_Harvard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rowland_Institute_at_Harva...) in the '90s. The place was wild. Land had been dead for a few years when I got there, but they still employed his driver. My recollection is that the driver brought in donuts once per week. The place felt like an upscale hotel with laboratories in it. And $$ was no object. Need a $40k laser? Just write the requisition. Looks like it was fully taken over by Harvard (at the time it was only peripherally associated). Another funny Land story... My postdoc advisor was a faculty member at another university in the 1970s and Land and his entourage were there visiting various labs. My advisor thumped Land on the chest and said that he liked his shirt. According to my advisor, Land's handlers were visibly upset, but Land appreciated being treated like a regular human.
    • crones 2y ago
      Great stories! The research institute gets a mention in the book too.
• Jimmc414 2y ago
  Endurance - about Ernest Shackleton and his crew during their 1914-1916 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance:_Shackleton%27s_Incredible_Voyage https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance:_Shackleton%27s_In...
  • 20wenty 2y ago
    Similar in nature is Farthest North: The Incredible Three-Year Voyage to the Frozen Latitudes of the North. Fridjtof Nansen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fridtjof_Nansen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fridtjof_Nansen) led the expedition.
  • deltarholamda 2y ago
    Second this suggestion. The one by Caroline Alexander is also very good. It's a story of the most incredible leadership during spectacular difficulty overcoming multiple seemingly impossible things.
  • quirk 2y ago
    Yep came here to recommend this. Incredible story.
  • krysp 2y ago
    A top recommendation along these lines is The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garard; a member of the Scott expedition to the south pole, which goes into detail of his winter journey (which the title refers to). One of the best historical adventure books I've read
    • sgt101 2y ago
      I came here to say this. Props.
  • rattray 2y ago
    Not related, but because I also liked that one, I'll add: Devil in the White City, by Eric Larson Covers the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. Light on some of the sorts of details OP is asking for; also follows the thread of a serial killer to keep things interesting for those less interested in the business/engineering, but still good.
• jkingsbery 2y ago
  The Last Viking - a biography of explorer Roald Amundsen The Wager- a book about a ship by the same name which wrecked in the Drake Passage. Eccentric Orbits - about the Iridium constellation. The Great Bridge by David McCullough - goes into a pretty good amount of detail in the engineering and sub-problems of construction of the Brooklyn Bridge.
• WillAdams 2y ago
  _The Biography of Ottmar Mergenthaler, Inventor of the Linotype_ by Carl Schlesinger https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3648638-the-biography-of-ottmar-mergenthaler-inventor-of-the-linotype https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3648638-the-biography-of... c.f., _Tolbert Lanston and the Monotype: The Origin of Digital Typesetting_ by Richard L Hopkins https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17140645-tolbert-lanston-and-the-monotype https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17140645-tolbert-lanston... For background on how difficult/apparently impossible this was, see the story of Mark Twain's investment in a typesetting machine: https://twain.lib.virginia.edu/yankee/cymach6.html https://twain.lib.virginia.edu/yankee/cymach6.html One of the more memorably moments of my life was visiting a local newspaper back when they were still setting type using a Linotype machine --- it's just incredible to watch one (or the competing Monotype) work. If I could, I'd have a Monotype machine in my shop along with a printing press, but first I'd need a shop, rather than a workbench at one end of the basement laundry room... It's my understanding that for a long while, the U.S. Patent Office refused to consider patents for intermittent windshield wiping mechanisms because none of them worked --- the actual story of the invention is far more sordid: https://thehustle.co/windshield-wiper-inventor-robert-kearns https://thehustle.co/windshield-wiper-inventor-robert-kearns For us folks interested in computers, there is of course Charles Babbage who tried and failed, yet still managed to create many of the concepts underlying our modern computing devices. While the story of a team, Tracy Kidder's _The Soul of a New Machine_ is a classic which I would highly recommend: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/7090.The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/7090.The_Soul_of_a_Ne... and for a more recent spin on things, look at the folks who crashed and burned such as Jerry Kaplan: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1171250.Startup https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1171250.Startup
• Dowwie 2y ago
  Power Broker
• mtmail 2y ago
  In the 1930s Phyllis Pearsall (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyllis_Pearsall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyllis_Pearsall) walked 3000 miles of every street of London (23000), collected house numbers, to create a street atlas to sell. Took her 4 years of 18 hour days. The book title is "Mrs P's Journey". The whole history of early map making is fascinating.
  • TechDebtDevin 2y ago
    Didnt have offsite backups, and if you did you were doing twice the work.
• newswasboring 2y ago
  The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll might be interesting to you. Its a story about how he tracked down a spy starting from a few pennies missing in a balance sheet. A very pleasant read and a good audio book too.
  • zekyl314 2y ago
    I was going to suggest the same book. I first ran into story on PBS as a teenager, it was titled "The KGB, the Computer and Me".
• 23B1 2y ago
  > Less interested in people and character studies. More interested in the mechanics of how things that we take for granted actually got built and what the world they were made in was like. These two things are inseparable.
• willturman 2y ago
  Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner is about America’s water infrastructure and does an incredible job of outlining the mind-blowing scale of it all as well as the political / historical context in which bureaucracies like the Bureau of Reclamation were able to build 30,000+ dams across nearly every instance of flowing water in the American West.
• te_chris 2y ago
  The Wager by David Grann, about a disastrous British maritime voyage in the 18th century that involved shipwreck, surviving castaways, multiple distinct routes back to Britain, then fighting over the story when different parties got back. None of this hagiographic bollocks.
• JoyfulTurkey 2y ago
  In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick. Story of the survivors of a sunken whale ship after a sperm whale attack. A source of inspiration for Moby Dick.
• jcgrillo 2y ago
  The Poincaré Conjecture by Donal O'Shea In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick
• simulo 2y ago
  Bruno Latour’s "The Pasteurization of France" is about Louis Pasteur and the creation and success of germ theory. It does explain it not by focussing on Pasteur per se, but by showing how different groups of people adapted it for different goals.
• joaodelgado 2y ago
  I've recently read Annapurna by Maurice Herzog. It's a recall of the first accent of an 8000m peak, told by the leader of the expedition. I highly recommend it.
• mikesabat 2y ago
  The first book I thought about from this prompt is The Fountainhead. It's fiction and was written in the 1940's, but is very relevant to modern times. Very well written and in my opinion this book is better than Atlas Shrugged.
• jdshaffer 2y ago
  "Farthest North" In 1893, Fridjtof Nansen set sail in the Fram, a ship specially designed and built to be frozen into the polar ice cap, withstand its crushing pressures, and travel with the sea’s drift closer to the North Pole than anyone had ever gone before. Experts said such a ship couldn't be built and that the voyage was tantamount to suicide. This brilliant first-person account, originally published in 1897, marks the beginning of the modern age of exploration. Nansen vividly describes the dangerous voyage and his 15-month-long dash to the North Pole by sledge. Farthest North is an unforgettable tale and a must-read for any armchair explorer. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/30197/30197-h/30197-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/30197/30197-h/30197-h.htm
  • _whiteCaps_ 2y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fram2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fram2 You might be interested in the upcoming Fram 2 mission. :-)
• iforaa 2y ago
  My favorite on this topic is The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power. It’s a deep dive into the emergence and evolution of the oil industry. Technological innovations, financial developments, political shifts and so on.
  • oblo_mov 2y ago
    Great call! I went for The New Map but this one is v high up my to read list.
  • angusb 2y ago
    I've been finding The Prize surprisingly light on technical details - I'm 1/3 of the way through the book and half way through the chronology of the oil industry and it hasn't even mentioned a distillation column. Does it get more technical?
• oblo_mov 2y ago
  I would recommend The New Map - it's about the extraordinary development of Fracking and how it changed geopolitics.
• pauldix 2y ago
  Great Fortune, a book about the making of Rockefeller Center is one of my favorites.
• lhh 2y ago
  Titan (about John Rockefeller and the making of Standard Oil) and House of Morgan (about J.P. Morgan, the man and the investment bank, and the making of the modern financial system) were both excellent.
• gwbas1c 2y ago
  American Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Marin J. Sherwin It is based on ~20 years of research about Robert Oppenheimer, and is the inspiration for the movie Oppenheimer. Robert Oppenheimer is the scientist who lead the development of the first atomic bomb. > Less interested in people and character studies. More interested in the mechanics of how things that we take for granted actually got built and what the world they were made in was like. In this case, the "people and character studies" are very critical to understanding "the mechanics of how things that we take for granted actually got built and what the world they were made in was like". The early part of the book goes in depth to Oppenheimer's social ties to communist groups, which is critical to understanding the reason why he was forbidden from continuing research in the latter part of his life. https://www.amazon.com/American-Prometheus-Triumph-Tragedy-Oppenheimer-ebook/dp/B000XUBEYS/ref=sr_1_1?sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/American-Prometheus-Triumph-Tragedy-O... (To make a long story short, the American Communists, and their sympathizers, in the 1930s were blissfully unaware that the Soviet Union was an authoritarian hellhole. Many of the people involved in the Manhattan project had ties to those American Communists, and thus scientists in the Soviet Union. Because, for them, the Manhattan project was an academic endeavor, they wanted to share their results with their Soviet collogues. And that's how the nuclear race started... Information was leaked to the Soviets in the name of science. Oppenheimer was a victim of the resulting witch hunt; which requires understanding the "people and character studies" part of the book.)
• dwayne_dibley 2y ago
  I really enjoyed 'How big things get done' [1], which is close to your 'how things.... got built' requirement. Very interesting read about delivery of really big projects. I also read 'Built'[2] which was a little more relatable about civil engineering, specifically the Shard in London. And finally 'Build' by Tony Fadell but this didn't quite hit the mark for me as it was more a memoir about how great he is. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/61327449-how-big-things-get-done https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/61327449-how-big-thin... [2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34921647-built https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34921647-built [3] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59696349-build https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59696349-build
• meifun 2y ago
  "The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan" By: Robert Kanigel A biography of one of the most innovative mathematicians of all time traces the rise of Srinivasa Ramanujan from his days as a clerk to his collaboration with one of England's greatest mathematicians There is also a movie with this same name. It was good, IMHO.
• jkristobans 2y ago
  The Founders Podcast (founderspodcast.com) would probably be the best source. There are a lot of book recommendations about how founders overcome obstacles to achieve great things.
• d_runs_far 2y ago
  I would suggest Loonshots - fascinating dive into both the technology and the conditions that allowed people to really make stuff happen (or not) https://www.bahcall.com/book/ https://www.bahcall.com/book/
• fnqi8ckfek 2y ago
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• js2 2y ago
  - Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet - A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts
• deleted 2y ago
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• joe8756438 2y ago
  American Genesis covers a few inventors around the turn of the century 1900, including wright bros IIRC, inspiring stuff. in the fiction realm i think the martian fits the bill too!
• phkahler 2y ago
  "THE WRIGHT BROTHERS" by Fred C. Kelly. This is the one I read and it turns out to be on project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/67672/67672-h/67672-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/67672/67672-h/67672-h.htm I'm really curious how that is considered public domain, it was published in 1943 and he died in 1959. Anyway, one of the things most fascinating to me was their attempts to sell an airplane to the US army and other business related things. You'd think inventing the airplane would bring quick financial rewards but it was a long road.
  • elendee 2y ago
    GPT tells me (take it or leave it) that books published before 1963 only had a copyright of 28 years generally, and it wasn't until 1978 that the "author life + 70 years" started
• ubj 2y ago
  "The Wright Brothers" by David McCullough - Shows how Orville and Wilbur surpassed the leading researchers of the day to be the first to achieve controlled, powered flight. Does a great job of describing their work ethic and research process. "The Myths of Innovation" by Scott Berkun - Not exactly about how hard things got done, but it discusses some of the misconceptions and assumptions we make about current technology and the process of inventing new tech.
• deanebarker 2y ago
  "Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea" is the story of a shipwreck discovery that has always enthralled me. I've read it three times, and I'm so inspired about all the challenges they solved along the way. (Note: the hero of the story went a little crazy in recent years. Hid from the law for a long time, and I think he just died... but still, the book itself is amazing.)
  • hundredwatt 2y ago
    +100000
• arschfick 2y ago
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• gcj 2y ago
  Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption Zamperini's life was a series of hard things. Going to the Olympics, surviving a plane crash, then 47 days at sea, then a Japanese concentration camp ... Very well written as well
  • gullywhumper 2y ago
    EB Sledge - With the Old Breed is the account of a combat infantryman in WWII in the Pacific. It's about the fear, misery, and despair soldiers faced as they struggled to survive the horrors of war. It was the basis for HBO's The Pacific (successor to Band of Brothers).
• stevenfoster 2y ago
  Fall of Carthage by Adrian Goldsworthy Few people understand the Punic wars and what it took to “delete” Carthage from the world. Delenda Cartago Est. Goldsworthy tells the story accessibly from both sides of the wars. Lessons that echo throughout history. More of a biography but still fits your criteria is The Wright Brothers by David McCullough. It’s an easy read and hard to put down. I had no idea what it took to make flying a thing until that book. We definitely take for granted how much those two men changed the world.
• ChicagoBoy11 2y ago
  Highly recommend Apollo by Blythe Cox and Murray. Tremendous engineering history of the Apollo program, and really makes you appreciate the numerous folks and terrific stories that all had to come together to make it happen.
• oc_elder 2y ago
  I find the The Jim Collins books to be insightful. Good to Great. Built to Last, etc. Focuses on how the organizations are constructed and tries to divine principles that are true across time.
  • ryandrake 2y ago
    Unfortunately, Good To Great is 300 pages of survivorship bias. It picks a group of companies that succeeded, and a group that failed, and then after the fact looks back to try to find what the survivors had in common. I don't know how you come out of that with any prescriptive steps on how to succeed. It's like having a classroom stand up and flip a coin, ask everyone who flipped tails to sit down, repeat the process until there's only a few people standing, and then interview them to try to understand what makes them good heads-flippers.
• cpach 2y ago
  You might like Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days. It’s written by Jessica Livingston, who founded Y Combinator.
• shrugsworth 2y ago
  Tune In: The Beatles: All These Years by Mark Lewisohn. I picked it up as a Beatles fan, but it actually reads more like "how did the Beatles happen" - a social history of the times, the factors that led to each of their development as artists, and their iterative development into the group that we know as The Beatles. Put another way, it's a deep dive into the four founders of one of the most successful artistic organizations of all time and their search for product-market fit. This is also part 1 of 3, ending when they finally achieve PMF, releasing their first number one record.
• whatnotests2 2y ago
  Seven Pillars of Wisdom, by T. E. Lawrence. During WWI he was sent from the UK to the Arabs to find a leader who could unite them and lead a rebellion against the Turks, who were allied with Germany. He succeeded.
• laxd 2y ago
  Fermat's Last Theorem, about Andrew Wiles long hard journey to prove it.
  • specproc 2y ago
    Maybe you're joking, but my takeaway from this fantastic book was it was about lots and lots and lots of people's cumulative effort. But yeah, came here to recommend this one. Brilliantly written, a true classic.
• deleted 2y ago
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• AlexCoventry 2y ago
  Colossus: The secrets of Bletchley Park's code-breaking computers[0] Describes how British cryptanalysts and engineers built the first vacuum-tube digital computer[1] to break the cipher[2] the Nazis were using for strategic communications. [0] https://global.oup.com/academic/product/colossus-9780199578146 https://global.oup.com/academic/product/colossus-97801995781... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Lorenz_cipher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Lorenz_ci...
• mindcrime 2y ago
  Dreaming In Code[1] is an interesting one. It recounts the history of the team (which included Mitch Kapor of Lotus fame) who built Chandler[2]. Chandler was intended to be a game-changing PIM (personal information manager) / note-taking app inspired by Lotus Agenda[3]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreaming_in_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreaming_in_Code [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandler_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandler_(software) [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Agenda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Agenda
• Jalad 2y ago
  Benjamin Franklin by Van Doren is a really in depth biography which I enjoyed. It basically tells how he was going absolutely gangbuster for 75 years
• Aaronstotle 2y ago
  If you are a fan of history, Conquistador: Hernan Cortes, King Montezuma, and the Last Stand of the Aztecs by Buddy Levy is a fantastic read. Prior to reading this book, I naively assumed Cortes waltzed into Meso America and took over, this is a well sourced historical account of everything that happened that led to the fall of Tenochtitlan.
• hyperific 2y ago
  "Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed" by Ben R. Rich and Leo Janos. Details, among other things, the engineering challenges faced during the development of the F-117 Nighthawk and the SR-71 Blackbird.
  • geocrasher 2y ago
    An excellent read, no doubt. I've actually read it a couple of times. Ben Rich was a great writer.
    • adamc 2y ago
      Boy, I don't agree with that last. It's a pretty interesting book, but the writing is pedestrian and there are far too many asides and stories that detract from the main points. By way of contrast, I read it because it was recommended after I said I loved "The Soul of a New Machine" (Tracy Kidder), which really is an extremely well-written book, in the "every word counts" sense. "The Soul of a New Machine" is a book that a writer can appreciate for the writing.
      • geocrasher 2y ago
        you have a point. how about this. s/writer/storyteller/
    • carabiner 2y ago
      It was written by Leo Janos, who also wrote Chuck Yeager's bio.
  • ashika 2y ago
    worth reading for rich's crazy jokes alone. the fact he is telling them to senior military brass in the context of negotiating his division's survival after kelly johnson's retirement makes them even funnier. my favorite - a boy comes home from school, finds his dad, and proudly declares "dad, i saved 25 cents by running alongside the bus instead of riding it!". the father shakes his head and replies sternly, "you fool, you should have run next to a taxi and saved five dollars"
• sandropuppo 2y ago
  I loved the book about Leonardo Delvecchio, the founder of Luxottica (the biggest sunglasses manufacturer in the world, owner of Rayban/Oakley/etc.) He became an orphan at age 9. Started working in factories at 14. Started working in glasses factories at 16. He built his own first at 27. Grew it from 0 to 6,000 employees. Died while still being the CEO of the company aged 86 years old. One of the best stories of perseverance, and doing hard things from nothing I've ever witnessed!
• TripleChecker 2y ago
  One of my favorites is Sam Walton: Made In America
• akamaka 2y ago
  Changing How the World Does Business: FedEx's Incredible Journey to Success - The Inside Story by Roger Frock is an excellent story of creating a completely new way of doing logistics, and what it takes to start a network-based business that can only work if it launches on a large scale from day one. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/574979/changing-how-the-world-does-business-by-roger-frock/9781576754139 https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/574979/changing-how-...
• bradstewart 2y ago
  Shoe Dog by Phil Night might fit the bill. It is definitely about the person (who founded Nike), but also a fascinating look into how the sportswear industry took hold, sponsorship deals, Michael Jordan, etc.
• srinath10 2y ago
  The co-founder of Autodesk, John Walker, chronicled the company's journey from founding through IPO and beyond: https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/ I haven't read all of it (~900 pages), but he seems like an honest man, humble with minimal ego, who doesn't sugarcoat the challenges of building a business from scratch as a non-business guy. He also includes internal memos and the like, so you do get a feel for the "mechanics" of company-building.
• ether3ric 2y ago
  How about Tesla giving away his patents to Westinghouse for AC motors?
• intpx 2y ago
  The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester
• __alexander 2y ago
  Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
• pololeono 2y ago
  House on Fire: The Fight to Eradicate Smallpox In House on Fire, William H. Foege describes his own experiences in public health and details the remarkable program that involved people from countries around the world in pursuit of a single objective―eliminating smallpox forever.
• Animats 2y ago
  > books about how hard things got done. American Steel, about how a small steel fabricator took over the US steel industry. Think, the story of the Watsons and IBM, about how IBM went from a maker of time clocks to the biggest name in computing. The Art of the Comeback, by Trump. This is the Trump book few read. Copies are around US$200 now. Written when Trump was down, it's more honest than his other book. Some things that were famously hard to develop: - Xerography. First demo in 1939, started to work around 1959, became a simple technology in the 1980s. - Television. First attempts in the 19th century, sort of worked by the 1930s, worked decently by the 1950s, worked well as digital HDTV in the late 1980s, and achieved really good and really cheap only in the last few years. - Steel. Goes back to ancient times. Not produced in quantity until the 1880s. Took about 10,000 tries to get the metallurgy for the Bessemer process right. Turns out you need analytical chemistry to make consistently good steel. Otherwise yield is poor. Many batches come out bad. - Magnetic resonance imaging. The guy who invented it was almost fired for wasting time. - Home grocery delivery. Check out why Webvan failed but Amazon succeeded. Some of the same people.
• atlasunshrugged 2y ago
  This is very much a shameless plug but I wrote a book, Rebooting a Nation, on how the country of Estonia was able to modernize post re-independence in the early '90s and become a leader in e-government (99% of government services accessible online) and a tech hub (Skype, Transferwise, Bolt, etc.). I tried to draw out practical lessons for policymakers in other countries, especially in the U.S. as I wrote it after having worked for the Estonian government and advised some members of Congress in DC on tech policy. It's available for pre-order now and comes out in a few months, link below. https://www.rebootinganation.com/ https://www.rebootinganation.com/
• joloooo 2y ago
  The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf It details Alexander von Humboldt, his travels through South America and Siberia, and general contributions to science. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23995249-the-invention-of-nature https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23995249-the-invention-o...
• 1attice 2y ago
  _Madhouse at the End of the Earth_ by Julian Sancton went hard. It documents the tragic expedition of Adrian de Gerlache to the south pole in the late 19th century. Due to hubris, they wound up locked in the ice overwinter, and came within a hair's breadth of death. A gripping read. 10/10 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jun/09/madhouse-at-the-end-of-the-earth-by-julian-sancton-review-endless-night https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jun/09/madhouse-at-th...
• jp42 2y ago
  The Making of Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. Its not about one people but a project, Manhattan Project. One of my most favorite book.
• mannykannot 2y ago
  Angle of Attack: Harrison Storms and the Race to the Moon, by Mike Gray.
• pmarreck 2y ago
  Any parenting book. ;)
• 65 2y ago
  The Power Broker, perhaps?
• Ringz 2y ago
  Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe
• djkivi 2y ago
  Masters of Doom is quite good about John Carmack and the creation of id Software.
  • zooweemama 2y ago
    I loved MoD! The audio book read by Will Wheaton is also pretty good.
  • shortrounddev2 2y ago
    Recommend Doom Guy as well, by John Romero. Kind of dispels a little bit of the mythology about Carmack. It doesn't downplay his contributions, but kind of frames them in context of the rest of the team. Masters of doom kind of portrays Carmack as a sort of wizard locked away in his tower while working on quake, when in actuality he struggled a great deal with the technology and personally, lashing out at the rest of the team. They hired some more experienced engineers to help take the load off of him for things like networking and other aspects of graphics. His major breakthrough with BSPs in quake was not the usage of BSPs (which he was not the first to pioneer; the technique had been described 30 years prior at AT&T), but caching mechanisms for the node adjacency graphs. Really humanizes Carmack a lot. There's also quite a few minor factual errors in MoD, but nothing major and nothing consequential related to Carmack
    • anothertroll123 2y ago
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• surfingdino 2y ago
  "The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power" by Daniel Yergin
• throw0101c 2y ago
  It's on my reading list, but I have not read it (yet), but perhaps How Big Things Get Done: * https://dangardner.ca/publication/how-big-things-get-done https://dangardner.ca/publication/how-big-things-get-done * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61327449-how-big-things-get-done https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61327449-how-big-things-...
• heikkilevanto 2y ago
  I hope surviving shipwrecks and such counts as getting hard things done. "Safety and Survival at the Sea" has a lot of those. Chapters like Fire, Man in Water, Man on life raft, Man in a boat, and so on. Each chapter has many short episodes, just the hard facts, leaving the details to your imagination. I can quote one from memory: "North Atlantic, November. 12 people on a life raft. The raft kept capsizing, righted by walking on the inside of the canopy. 7 survived."
• kabdib 2y ago
  Tracy Kidder, _Soul of a New Machine_ Henry SF Cooper, _The Evening Star_ (debugging OS race conditions on a Venus orbiter) Pascal Zachary, _Showstopper_ (about David Cutler and Windows NT) Richard Preston, _American Steel_ (building an early continuous casting steel mill in the midwest)
• thetanka 2y ago
  Maybe a bit off-topic if you are less interested in people and character studies, but it is one of the books I have read the most. The Age of Uncertainty by Tobias Hürter It’s about the minds who redefined our understanding of the universe, and I would say they were people who did a hard thing or two. https://openlibrary.org/books/OL37331178M/Age_of_Uncertainty https://openlibrary.org/books/OL37331178M/Age_of_Uncertainty
• black_13 2y ago
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• hartator 2y ago
  “From Good to Great” by Jim Collins. Actual science-based data about good leadership.
• stonlyb 2y ago
  Not a book but here's Biochemist Katalin Karikó on her journey from a childhood in communist Hungary to her Nobel-winning work on mRNA. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/katalin-karikos-nobel-prize-winning-work-on-mrna-was-long-ignored-and-led-to/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/katalin-karikos-n...
• krishna2 2y ago
  Robin Marantz Henig: Monk in the Garden: Life of Gregor Mendel An amazing biography. The perseverance and meticulousness with Mendel performed the experiments is very inspiring. He was not the typical gifted/talented student either. He would face many difficulties at school as well as while trying to be a priest.
• eig 2y ago
  The Emperor of all Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee. This book describes how hundreds of people tried (and failed) to cure cancer over *millennia*. It spends a lot of time talking about how the modern approach, which works surprisingly well, was developed by Sidney Farber and others through great effort and a lot of good science. My feeling when reading this book was similar to reading about the making of the atomic bomb- what happens when you put a bunch of smart people in a box and tell them to solve a problem. However, this time it didn't work nearly as well, because as we found out, curing cancer is an order of magnitude harder than building an atomic bomb. Building the bomb required new engineering, while curing cancer requires new science and new engineering.
• rythmshifter 2y ago
  Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose. The tale of Lewis and Clark as told largely from Lewis' journal from the journey.
• vidro3 2y ago
  Longitude
• vidro3 2y ago
  Longitude dava sobel
• ForOldHack 2y ago
  Latitude | Book by Nicholas Crane
• suchoudh 2y ago
  Simply Fly: A Deccan Odyssey, Collins Business, 2010, ISBN 978-81-7223-842-1, 978-93-5029-155-9 amazon link:: https://www.amazon.in/Simply-Fly-Odyssey-Captain-Gopinath/dp/935029155X https://www.amazon.in/Simply-Fly-Odyssey-Captain-Gopinath/dp... he created the low cost airline in India. There is a movie also based on his life - Sarfira ( starring Akshay Kumar)
• nvartolomei 2y ago
  *Engines That Move Markets: Technology Investing from Railroads to the Internet and Beyond* by Alasdair G. M. Nairn I’ve had a few aha moments while reading this book. Although it's primarily written from an investor's perspective, it does contain a fair share of insight about creation and commercialisation of technology, the mechanics of monopolies, government involvement, foreign affairs, etc.
• adamtaylor_13 2y ago
  Maybe controversial but Elon Musk’s biography is basically just a 600+ page book about how one man got an unbelievable amount of things done against fairly insane odds. It’s been one of the books that surprised me the most. It totally changed my opinion of the man.
  • computerthings 2y ago
    What hard proof is there of him doing something hard that you have expertise on? If he lies, so badly, so hilariously, about being good at video games -- apropos nobody caring whether he is -- what else is he lying about? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6N-WW0UDrVQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6N-WW0UDrVQ As a YT comment on another video put it: > For anyone unfamiliar with Path of Exile 2, this is like someone pretending to be a grandmaster chess player not knowing how a rook moves. There are no ifs or buts about that. Either you know this is true, or you also don't know the game Elon pretended to be one of the best players of. Or take him just talking nonsense about Twitter, then firing the person who corrects him: https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/14/musk_twitter_rpc_spat/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/14/musk_twitter_rpc_spat... None of that squares with being intellectually curious. Never mind him claiming Hitler was a communist. It's like saying someone build 20 hospitals in [country] because they "are so compassionate". But I, with my own eyes, see him kick a homeless person and bark an ugly laugh, and more than once, so I know for a fact that even if his signature is on some papers related to those hospitals, even if he was involved with the planning and whatnot, it is not because he is "so compassionate". So in the same way I know none of this is because he is so very intelligent and pragmatic. At least if I think of intelligence as something general, simply the ability to think and memorize and connect facts. That's just not in the cards anymore.
    • adamtaylor_13 2y ago
      I don’t have expertise on much, so I’m not sure what to tell you there. Bragging about being good at a video game isn’t exactly a critique I really care about. Most people who surmount incredible odds aren’t normal, stable people so I don’t know what your point is. Also, SpaceX is proof that he’s done hard things. Again, all this is documented in the book. If you’re someone who cares about intellectual curiosity, you should check out the book for yourself.
• the__alchemist 2y ago
  - The making of the Atomic bomb - The Eighth Day of creation Both long, and both are built from first-hand interviews of people who solved some of the most difficult problems in the 20th century.
• Steffajos 2y ago
  Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes does a great job covering the rivalry between Edison, Tesla, and Westinghouse over electrifying the world. I liked how it broke down the technical and business challenges and showed the impact on everyday life and industry.
• haakonhr 2y ago
  Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl, a explorer/anthropologist. He and a group of other volunteers sailed across the pacific on a raft built using ancient methods to prove that the pacific isles were settled by south americans (this turned out to be wrong based on population genetics). Great read!
• yef 2y ago
  Some time ago, I wrote a few stories along these lines mostly for fun. https://www.hardmode.app/ https://www.hardmode.app/ I'm quite aware of survivorship bias, and it is a theme I had thought about but wasn't sure how to frame in terms of individual stories.
• stonlyb 2y ago
  list of (most of) the books mentioned in this thread so far. I tried reading every comment but used chatGPT instead. 1. The Big Rich - Texas oil boom. 2. Barbarians at the Gate - Private equity origins. 3. Masters of Doom - John Carmack and Id Software. 4. Einstein by Walter Isaacson - Einstein's discoveries. 5. Houdini!!! - The escape artist and magician. 6. The Double Helix - DNA discovery. 7. Stress Test by Tim Geithner - Financial crisis. 8. Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl - Concentration camp survival. 9. The Chariots of Apollo - NASA's space program. 10. Across the Airless Wilds by Earl Swift - Development of the moon buggy. 11. Apollo: The Race to the Moon by Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox - Apollo missions. 12. The Secret Life of Groceries by Benjamin Lorr - Food supply chains. 13. The Prize by Daniel Yergin - Oil industry evolution. 14. Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson - Ambitious wreck divers. 15. The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes - Manhattan Project. 16. American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin - Robert Oppenheimer. 17. Conquistador by Buddy Levy - Hernán Cortés and the Aztecs. 18. Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner - Water infrastructure in the American West. 19. The Wright Brothers by David McCullough - The invention of flight. 20. Walt Disney by Neal Gabler - Vision and innovation in entertainment. 21. Tuxedo Park by Jennet Conant - Invention of radar. 22. Insisting on the Impossible - Edwin Land and instant photography. 23. The Logic of Failure - Understanding and avoiding failure. 24. The Big Short by Michael Lewis - 2008 financial crisis. 25. The Box by Marc Levinson - Shipping container revolution. 26. Latitude by Nicholas Crane - Cartography innovations. 27. When the Heavens Went on Sale by Ashlee Vance - Space startups. 28. The Founders by Jimmy Soni - PayPal's early days. 29. The Perfectionists by Simon Winchester - Precision engineering. 30. The Little Engine That Could - Children's classic. 31. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell - Success mechanics. 32. Shoe Dog by Phil Knight - Founding of Nike. 33. Black Hole Blues by Janna Levin - Building LIGO. 34. Freedom’s Forge - WWII industry mobilization. 35. Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes - Electrification by Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse. 36. The Path Between the Seas by David McCullough - Panama Canal construction. 37. Annapurna by Maurice Herzog - Climbing a Himalayan peak. 38. Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder - Data General engineers. 39. Showstopper by G. Pascal Zachary - Development of Windows NT. 40. Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand - WWII survival. 41. The Measure of All Things by Ken Alder - Defining the meter. 42. The Cuckoo’s Egg by Clifford Stoll - Tracking a hacker. 43. The Man Who Knew Infinity by Robert Kanigel - Srinivasa Ramanujan. 44. The Power Broker by Robert Caro - Robert Moses and New York infrastructure. 45. How Big Things Get Done - Large-scale project execution. 46. Dealers of Lightning by Michael A. Hiltzik - Xerox PARC. 47. Built by Roma Agrawal - Civil engineering insights. 48. The Will to Keep Winning by Daigo Umehara - Competitive gaming. 49. Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold - Low-temperature physics. 50. Carrying the Fire by Michael Collins - Apollo 11.
• silexia 2y ago
  Autobiographies are far better than biographies here as the biographers typically have no clue as to what made the successful person successful. The best autobiography I've ever read in terms of nuggets of wisdom is Sam Walton's made in America autobiography.
• petesmithy 2y ago
  Shadow Divers (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9530.Shadow_Divers https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9530.Shadow_Divers) - story of amateur deep sea divers who discover a sunken German U-Boat and spend years trying to get into it. Genuinely riveting story, absolute nutters operating at the edge of what’s possible (and what should be done?).