Ten books that feed and fray men’s souls

Katie Hafner was on staff at The New York Times for ten years, where she remains a frequent contributor, writing on healthcare and technology. She has also worked at Newsweek and BusinessWeek, and has written for The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Wired, The New Republic, The Washington Post, and O, The Oprah Magazine. She is the author of five previous works of nonfiction covering a range of topics, including the origins of the Internet, computer hackers, German reunification, and the pianist Glenn Gould.

Her first novel, The Boys, was published in July 2022.

At Publishers Weekly Hafner tagged ten books that men love, including:

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel

In 1995, the year this book came out, it was deemed the perfect gift for the man who has everything. Three generations of the Harrison family developed spring-driven clocks for shipboard use because pendulums didn't work. They finally won a large cash prize. At the same time, the scurrilous Astronomer Royal did everything he could to prevent them from winning because he wanted an astronomical solution to longitude navigation. One friend, a computer scientist, told me he loved this book “because the engineers win in the end.”

Read about another entry on the list.

Longitude is among Peter F. Stevens's top ten nautical books.

--Marshal Zeringue