Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things

River of Doubt - Candice Millard

https://www.candicemillard.com/river-of-doubt.html

Covers Teddy Roosevelt's Amazon expedition. To the comment about "weren't people living in the Amazon" - read the book. The Brazilian government was scouting and mapping the terrain for the project of connecting the coasts with telegraph lines. This was uncharted territory and the chance of not returning was high.

I cannot recommend enough.

Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology (goodreads link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/809315.Making_PCR)

for a short video version of this history, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaXKQ70q4KQ from Veritasium.

reasons for recommendation: - it's an example in the biological science, to complement the heavy representation of examples from computer science and entrepreneurship in this thread - the main character, Kary Mullis, is colorful and controversial. Not a likable individual, but nevertheless had traits (mostly an unreasonable obsession) that enabled him to make such a discovery - the discovery of high temperature tolerant enzymes predated Mullis' insight by some two decades, and it played a key role in making PCR practical and widely applicable. this is a pattern I have seen often in major inventions, which were made possible by prior discoveries (often decades old) which lay dormant until someone put everything together. This process of re-discovering the pieces and making connections is also where I think machine learning could be particularly helpful. In fact this is my main motivation for picking up this book (by online reviews, not a particularly well-written one).

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.

The Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan is a nice read. You can learn critical thinking from this book.

Shackleton and his crew became something of a hero of mine after I read South and Endurance. Less so frok.a masculine perspective, but more of a fortitude thing. There is a certain triumph felt when we persevere through impossible odds, and ever since I've been attracted to a genre of stories that I loosely label as "Frozen Thrillers," where humans just have to deal with bad things happening in cold unforgiving environments.