HACKER Q&A
📣 fdw

Biographies of Companies or Things?


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

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

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

  👤 karaterobot Accepted Answer ✓
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

👤 helph67
"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
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
For a nice collection of shorter stories, there's also:

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