// reading list
Nonfiction
- Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage – Alfred Lansing
- (get the audiobook, it is better)
- I went through a 12 month phase of talking about this book non-stop. Is it winter? Are you cold? Shackleton was colder.
- Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants – John Drury Clark
- Half dairy, half history, respects the reader like no other
- Isaac Asimov writes the forward, as John’s former student
- The Philadelphia Chromosome: A Genetic Mystery, a Lethal Cancer, and the Improbable Invention of a Lifesaving Treatment – Jessica Wapner
- Part of why I went into biology
- No time on our side – Roger Chapman
- out of print, probably the library is your best bet
- Submersible rescue, written by a pilot on the stricken vessel.
- Road to the 707: The Inside Story of Designing the 707 – William H. Cook
- Why every airliner looks like the 707
- If you aren’t at least open to loving wind-tunnels, pass on this book
- Sail Ho! My Early Years at Sea with squeals Tramps and Ladies; My Early Years in Steamers and Commodore – Sir James Bissett
- (used, or library)
- Real life Forrest Gump of ocean liners.
- He just describes his life as he starts in “windjammers” going around “the horn,” and proceeds to picks up the survivors of the Titanic, and eventually becomes captain of the RMS Queen Elizabeth and sleeps with the Magna Carta under his bed, because it “didn’t fit in the biggest safe.”
- The Demon Under the Microscope: From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor’s Heroic Search for the World’s First Miracle Drug – Thomas Hager
- The first part is a bit gruesome, it’s fine to skim or skip (he’s a German medic in WW1)
- The story of the first mass produced antibiotic (sulfa drugs, not penicillin)
- Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight – David A. Mindell
- World’s first big software project.