Ask HN: Biographies of Companies or Things?

4 points by fdw 3 years ago | 6 comments

I've enjoyed books narrating the history of a company or a thing, like David McCullough's The Path Between the Seas, Jon Gertner's The Idea Factory or Dava Sobel's Longitude.

But, missing a name for this particular genre, I have a hard time finding new entries. Does HN have anything of that kind to recommend?

Other books I've found so far: - Skunk Works by Ben E. Rich & Leo Janos - The Box by Marc Levinson - Apollo by Charles A Murray & Catherine Bly Cox - The Great Bridge also by David McCullough

karaterobot 3 years ago |

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:

https://www.librarything.com/tag/microhistory

jbn 3 years ago | |

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.

fdw 3 years ago | |

That looks really interesting, thank you very much!

helph67 3 years ago |

"Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age" April 2000 by Michael A. Hiltzik Publisher: Harper Business, ISBN:978-0-88730-989-2

See the description of the book here https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.5555/518513

caprock 3 years ago |

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.

caprock 3 years ago |

For a nice collection of shorter stories, there's also:

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days Book by Jessica Livingston