Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things

492 points · zachlatta · 10 days ago

Seeking recommendations for books about how hard things got done. I like the Acquired podcast, but am looking for reading deeper than it.

I’m reading The Big Rich about the oil boom in Texas and like it. I also liked Barbarians at the Gate about how private equity got created and how deals went down.

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.

435 comments
jll29 · 6 days 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.

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abtinf · 7 days 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).

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atlasunshrugged · 6 days 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/

Jimmc414 · 6 days ago

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jdshaffer · 6 days 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

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