Failure (overviews & introductions)
Print:
- Banvard’s Folly: Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn’t Change the World by Paul Collins
- Complete & Utter Failure: A Celebration of Also-Rans, Runners Up, Never-Weres, & Total Flops by Neil Steinberg
- The Book of Heroic Failures: The Official Handbook of the Not Terribly Good Club of Great Britain by Stephen Pile
- Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond
- Brilliant Blunders: From Darwin to Einstein – Colossal Mistakes by Great Scientists that Changed our Understanding of Life and the Universe by Mario Livio
Online:
- A Tribute to Failure – NPR
- In Praise of Failure – New York Times
- When All Else Fails, He Writes About It – Washington Post
- Dublin Science Gallery Exhibit “Fail Better” – Summer 2014
Schadenfreude: Delighting in the Failure of Others
Print:
- Schadenfreude, Baby!: A Delicious Look at the Misfortune of Others (and the Pleasure it Brings Us) by Laura Lee
- The Joy of Pain: Schadenfreude and the Dark Side of Human Nature by Richard H. Smith
- The Hunger Games and Philosophy: A Critique of Pure Treason edited by George A. Dunn and Nicolas Michaud
- Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck: Why We Can’t Look Away by Eric G. Wilson
- The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty by Simon Baron-Cohen
- Sweet Revenge: The Wicked Delights of Getting Even by Regina Barreca
- Personality and Sense of Humor by Avner Ziv
- The Darwin Awards: Countdown to Extinction by Wendy Northcutt
Engineering Disaster: The Best and Worst Ideas in Industrial Design
Print:
- St. Francis Dam Disaster by John Nichols
- Man Made Disaster: The Story of St. Francis Dam by Charles F. Outland
- Catastrophe to Triumph: Bridges of the Tacoma Narrows by Richard S. Hobbs
- Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919 by Stephen Puleo
- It Looked Good on Paper: Bizarre Inventions, Design Disasters, and Engineering Follies by Bill Fawcett
- Lessons amid the Rubble: An Introduction to Post-Disaster Engineering and Ethics by Sarah K. A. Pfatteicher
- Western Times and Water Wars: State, Culture, and Rebellion in California by John H. Walton
Online:
- How Stuff Works: Understanding the Tacoma Narrows Bridge (Video)
- Engineering Failures
- The Science of the Great Molasses Flood – Scientific American
- Civil Engineering Careers – Civil Engineering Disasters: The St. Francis Dam Flooding
- Greatest Dead Angelinos: William Mulholland
- William Mulholland and the Casualties of LA Imperialism
Military Blunders from Bomb Dropping Bats to Steam Cannons of Doom
Print:
- A Strange Engine of War: The “Winans” Steam Gun and Maryland in the Civil War by John W. Lamb
- Bat Bomb: World War II’s Other Secret Weapon by Jack Couffer
- Fortress France: The Maginot Line and French Defenses in World War II by J E Kaufmann, H W Kaufmann, and Tomasz Idzikowski
- Hannibal and Me: What History’s Greatest Military Strategist Can Teach Us About Success and Failure by Andreas Kluth
Online:
Fail, Fail Again, Fail Better: The Hidden Power of Failure
Print:
- Great Failures of the Extremely Successful: Mistakes, Adversity, Failure and Other Steppingstones to Success by Steve Young
- The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success by Megan McArdle
Online:
- J.K. Rowling Speech – ‘The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination’
- A Tribute to Failure by Marcelo Gleiser
- In Praise of Failure by Costica Bradatan – New York Times
- Steve Jobs Commencement Speech to Stanford, 2005
Infernal Devices: Inventors Killed by Their Own Inventions
Print:
- Deadly Glow: The Raduim Dial Worker Tragedy by Ross Mullner
- Radioactive: Marie and Pierre Curie; A Tale of Love and Fallout by Lauren Redniss
- Unsinkable: The Full Story of the HMS Titanic by Daniel Allan Butler
Online:
- BBC Archive: The Titanic
- Franz Reichelt Jumping from the Eiffel Tower (Video)
- Footage of the Titanic leaving Southhampton (Video)
Died Trying: Dead Explorers & Expeditions Gone Horribly Wrong
Print:
- Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before by Tony Horowitz
- Farther Than Any Man: The Rise and Fall of Captain James Cook by Martin Dugard
- Scott’s Last Expedition – The Personal Journals of Captain R. F. Scott, C.V.O., R.N., on His Journey to the South Pole by Robert Falcon Scott
- Race To The End: Amundsen, Scott, and the Attainment of the South Pole by Ross D. E. MacPhee
- Scott’s Last Expedition by Steve Parker, Natural History Museum London
- The Fateful Journey: The Expedition of Alexine Tinne and Theodor von Heuglin in Sudan (1863-1864) by Robert Joost Willink
Online:
- Royal Museums Greenwich: James Cook
- Mapping the Pacific Coast: James Cook’s Maps
- State Library, New South Wales: James Cook
- Glossopteris indica specimen at the Museum of Natural History, London (Video)
- Scott’s Hut, Antarctica: Google Street View Fly Through
- Diaries of Robert Falcon Scott
- Hooligan Cocks: Graphic Hundred-Year-Old Penguin Sex Manuscript Uncovered – Wired.uk article
- Hooligan Cocks: PDF of Original Paper
- Hooligan Cocks (Video)
- Alexine & The Nile, Saudi Aramco 1983
Printable PDF version, books only>
For each salon, we invite our speakers to share the resources and interesting reading they came across in researching their talk, so that we can all dig more deeply. This reading list was compiled by Odd Salon with Todd Barrett, Kelly Jensen, and Ryan Galiotto. Thank you!
