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Ask HN: Biographies of Companies or Things?

4 points by fdw ↗ HN
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

6 comments

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karaterobot
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

fdw
That looks really interesting, thank you very much!
jbn
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.

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