In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick.
Story of the survivors of a sunken whale ship after a sperm whale attack. A source of inspiration for Moby Dick.
Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things
191–200 of 454 posts
Re: Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things
#192Surviving a concentration camp seems a tad difficult. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man's_Search_for_Meaning Everyone should read this at least twice in their lives.
I am not reading it
Re: Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things
#193The Poincaré Conjecture by Donal O'Shea
In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick
Re: Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things
#194Bruno Latour’s "The Pasteurization of France" is about Louis Pasteur and the creation and success of germ theory. It does explain it not by focussing on Pasteur per se, but by showing how different groups of people adapted it for different goals.
Re: Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things
#195I've recently read Annapurna by Maurice Herzog.
It's a recall of the first accent of an 8000m peak, told by the leader of the expedition.
I highly recommend it.
Re: Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things
#196The first book I thought about from this prompt is The Fountainhead. It's fiction and was written in the 1940's, but is very relevant to modern times. Very well written and in my opinion this book is better than Atlas Shrugged.
Re: Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things
#197"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.
Re: Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things
#198Endurance - about Ernest Shackleton and his crew during their 1914-1916 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance:_Shackleton%27s_In...
Similar in nature is Farthest North: The Incredible Three-Year Voyage to the Frozen Latitudes of the North. Fridjtof Nansen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fridtjof_Nansen) led the expedition.
Re: Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things
#199My favorite on this topic is The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power. It’s a deep dive into the emergence and evolution of the oil industry. Technological innovations, financial developments, political shifts and so on.
Re: Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things
#200I would recommend The New Map - it's about the extraordinary development of Fracking and how it changed geopolitics.