Desert Island Books.

For domestic reasons, I have been recently reunited with my book collection. There is a fantastic BBC radio series (70+ years old now) where celebrities talk about the 8 songs/tracks/music pieces they would take to a Desert Island. Music is tough. But much to my surprise, re-studying my ‘library’, my list of eight books is easy. In no particular order:

Failure Is Not An Option. A testament to what humans can achieve freed from Health and Safety, HR and the corporate bullshit of ‘Your safety is our top priority’. Management everywhere need to read this. The best of the Apollo books, by far. As my colleague Marcel Salathe is fond of saying, quoting I think one of the Roosevelts: When safety comes first, America is lost. These guys had higher ambitions, and they walked in the heavens. Americans, read this: it is what you are capable of.

A Bright Shining Lie. I see I first read this a quarter century ago. It is still with me. Searing.

The Donkeys. The folly of man. Even more powerful since Sean and I, and later son Matthew and I, went to the battlefields, this book in hand. The ‘hills’ are slight rises. The mud is awful. The inanity of the carnage unimaginable.

Lindberg. An amazing man, described by an amazing biographer. A biographer who never discovered the extra families his subject raised.

Into the Silence. “They had seen so much of death that life mattered less than the moments of being alive.” A ballsy lesson for us all: exploration of the world, of ourselves, trumps everything.

The Idea Factory. The ambition of these guys. Let’s bounce a telephone signal from California to New York off an earth-orbit satellite the size of a basket ball… if only someone could figure a way to put a satellite in earth orbit (it was the 1940s). Before that – before that – they had the math of cell phones sorted. Humanity has lost so much ambition.

Steve Jobs. I suppose there are people on the planet who have not read this book. For me, it induced calm. It is ok to imagine that computers should be better, easier to use. I look forward to the day. Meantime, important lesson: one should suffer ass-holes, just in case they’re the one.

Lovelock. The dilemma of the Berlin moment. Better to achieve perfection, just once in a life after years of planning? Or to aspire and never make it? Or to never be in the running?

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