Ask HN: Books about people who persevered when no one else believed in them? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Books about people who persevered when no one else believed in them?

46 pointsf0e4c2f736 comments

Looking for suggestions. Can be fiction or non-fiction.

Longitude - nonfic by dana sobel About a scientist/engineer who developed a sufficiently accurate clock to calculate longitude on an oceangoing ship in the age of sail. Which was of vast importance to sailing. The establishment was strongly in favor of astronomy based methods of calculating longitude.

Barbara McClintock is a real scientist who fits this mold, but I haven't read a biography of her to specifically recommend.

There's an excellent British TV movie version of Longitude (200 minutes, 2000, Jeremy Irons, Michael Gambon) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0192263/

Cassandra was a Trojan priestess of Apollo in Greek mythology cursed to utter true prophecies, but never to be believed

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra

https://www.google.com/search?q=books+about+cassandra+of+tro...

which makes you wonder why would anyone name a distributed database acting as a “source of truth” Cassandra…

Because according to the mythology, Cassandra's prophecies actually were predicting the truth.

I think the part where people didn't believe her wasn't relevant, when it came to the DB product naming. She was a "source of truth" regardless of people's belief in it.

Ball Lightning by Cixin Liu is about a scientist who decides to dedicate his life to studying ball lightning (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning) when nobody takes it seriously

Lift Off by Eric Berger details early days of SpaceX

Themistocles[1] was convinced that the Persian empire will attack the Greeks for a second time, so he pushed for crating a naval fleet. Athenians (democracy eh?) were not on board, so he played an entire city by knowingly lying to them (those politician sucked from day one) effectively saving the city and to an extend western civilization as we know it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Themistocles

A Melville bio might be sobering.

Melville's Moby Dick was so widely ignored (at best) that he quit writing prose for decades before starting Billy Budd a few years before his death. By that time, Moby was out-of-print ... it wasn't a 'work of genius' or a 'great American classic' for decades longer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Sold_the_Moon

Nietzsche wrote most of his books in isolated obscurity and had to personally pay to get some of them published.

Isaac Newton, Wright Brothers, almost any pioneer is doubted since it hasn't been done until they did it

A book on the Wright brothers I would very much recommend is "The Bishop's Boys", fascinating story with a lot of detail I was unaware of. From my recollection it wasn't so much no-one believed in them as they just didn't give a dam what others thought, they just were interested in trying. I should clarify that by saying that they were certainly interested in learning what others had done but, as far as I recall, they weren't concerned what others thought about the probability of success.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23827.The_Bishop_s_Boys

Newton the Alchemist: Science, Enigma, and the Quest for Nature's "Secret Fire" by William Newman details Isaac Newton's long-term studies in alchemy.

James Dyson's autobiography "Against the Odds". It is an excellent book about original thinking and it is hugly underrated.

Moby Dick.

NN Taleb basically has a book trilogy dedicated to making complicated life bets. Start with Black Swan. You can skip some.

Jet Man by Duncan Campbell-Smith about Frank Whittle who invented the jet engine (in parallel with Hans von Ohain)

two from finance:

Confidence Game: How Hedge Fund Manager Bill Ackman Called Wall Street's Bluff // Christine Richard

Fooling Some of the People All of the Time // David Einhorn

Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society.

e.g. Peter Mitchell's chemiosmotic theory of how living cells power themselves at a molecular level was not accepted for many years.

The Bible.

Not quite what you’re looking for, but highly recommend:

A Message to Garcia

This generation needs this mindset. My first manager gave it to me.

A Message to Garcia [0] was often passed around while I was in the Navy. That in addition to Iron and the Soul by Henry Rollins [1].

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Message_to_Garcia

[1] https://www.nerdfitness.com/iron-and-soul/

+1 for Iron and the Soul. Really spoke to me.

Perseverance/patience/persistence (sabr) is the common theme in the Quran. It's said to be one of the two core traits of faith, the other being gratefulness. The idea is that anyone can profess faith, but the real test of faith is whether they believe things will be fine when pitted against all odds. Not so much light triumphing against dark, but faith that God is ultimately in control.

The Quranic take on David vs Goliath was that it required perseverance to follow David, who did not look much like a King. And after marching, they were exhausted and thirsty, reached the river, but were only allowed to take a single sip. Anyone who took more than a sip would not be part of the battle with Goliath. So there were only a few in the battle, which made the odds seem impossible, and so they prayed to God for perseverance (2:250) and Goliath was defeated in the most unexpected way.

Most tales about a Prophet is a story of perseverance.

Neptune's Apprentice is a memoir by Marie DeSantis, who was one the first woman to break into the commercial fishing industry in California in the 1960's.

I'm biased because I work in commercial fishing myself, but this was a very good read.

The Little Engine That Could

Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs

Non-fiction:

-Papillion by Henri Charrière: https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/bbd4b0ce-baad-4f04-9e98-...

-Escape from Camp 14 by Blaine Harden: https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/112010c8-be72-4ddc-b5e5-...

-The Naked Don't Fear the Water by Matthieu Aikins: https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/2572756e-ab98-4376-94be-...

-Barbie & Ruth by Robin Gerber: https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/69d6197f-f9dd-465f-bc3a-...

-The Fish That Ate the Whale by Rich Cohen (Starts slow but the story is wild.): https://app.thestorygraph.com/browse?button=&search_term=fis...

Fiction:

-The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas: https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/abd1c172-fbba-469d-a99c-...

-Hatchet by Gary Paulson: https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/8a8b0f34-bdec-4e08-bad8-...

-The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah (This one is kind of a rough read.): https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/8a740c2e-a536-47c8-8d67-...

-Pachinko by Min Jin Lee: https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/c906e464-dc41-4f82-9601-...

-The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri: https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/297187a2-ad88-4b2b-a453-...

-Bear Town by Fredrik Backman (It's not quite what you're looking for, but close, and really good.): https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/1e759f91-b8e7-4a7b-b10a-...

A Confederacy of Dunces.

The sign of a person with taste and decency, theology and geometry.

Not a book, but the podcast Without Fail discusses these sort of stories. It's by Alex Blumberg the same person who did the Start Up podcast.

A choice of weapons - Gordon Parks

Martin Eden by Jack London

The Splendid and the Vile

Gregor Mendel

Ayn Rand novels have this theme IIRC.

It’s been a few decades, though I recall Rand’s antagonists fully believing in the protagonist’s chance of success - and actively discouraging it.

To me there’s a distinction between this and disbelief.

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