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