It's Not About the Bike
It is such an all-American story. A lanky kid from Plano, Texas, is raised by a feisty, single parent who sacrifices for her son, who becomes one of our country's greatest athletes. Given that background, it is understandable why Armstrong was able to channel his boundless energy toward athletic endeavors. By his senior year in high school, he was already a professional triathlete and was training with the U.S. Olympic cycling developmental team. In 1993, Armstrong secured a position in the ranks of world-class cyclists by winning the World Championship and a Tour de France stage, but in 1996, he was diagnosed with testicular cancer. Armstrong entered an unknown battlefield and challenged it as if climbing through the Alps: aggressive yet tactical. He beat the cancer and proceeded to stun all the pundits by winning the 1999 Tour de France. In this memoir, Armstrong covers his early years swiftly with a blunt matter-of-factness, but the main focus is on his battle with cancer. Readers will respond to the inspirational recovery story, and they will appreciate the behind-the-scenes cycling information. After he won the Tour, his mother was quoted as saying that her son's whole life has been a fight against the odds; we see here that she was not exaggerating. Brenda Barrera
Stats for nerds
4recommend
5mentions
4people
2008–2022years
100% recommend
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- That would be a long list, given that I read a lot of books and would generally say that most of the books I've read were worth investing time in to some extent. But for what it's worth, here's a subset, cribbed from my previous HN comments:
Something Deeply Hidden - Sean Carroll
The Universe Speaks in Numbers: How Modern Math Reveals Nature's Deepest Secrets - Graham Farmelo
The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdos and the Search for Mathematical Truth - Paul Hoffman
The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan - Robert Kanigel
Lost in Math - Sabine Hossenfelder
The First Three Minutes - Steven Weinberg
Hyperspace - Michio Kaku
Not Even Wrong - Peter Woit
The Trouble With Physics - Lee Smolin
About Time - Paul Davies
Time Reborn - Lee Smolin
The Elegant Universe - Brian Greene
The Hidden Reality - Brian Greene
The Fabric of the Cosmos - Brian Greene
Quantum Space: Loop Quantum Gravity and the Search for the Structure of Space, Time, and the Universe - Jim Baggott
The Universe Speaks in Numbers: How Modern Math Reveals Nature's Deepest Secrets - Graham Farmelo
Three Roads To Quantum Gravity - Lee Smolin
Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos - Seth Lloyd
Higgs - The invention and discovery of the 'God Particle' - Jim Baggott
Analogy Making As Perception - Melanie Mitchell
Society of Mind - Marvin Minsky
Engineering General Intelligence, Part 1 - Ben Goertzel
Engineering General Intelligence, Part 2 - Ben Goertzel
The AGI Revolution - Ben Goertzel
Hackers & Painters by our very own Paul "pg" Graham
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - Steven Levy
The Soul of a New Machine - Tracy Kidder
Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier - Katie Hafner & John Markoff
Artificial Life: A Report from the Frontier Where Computers Meet Biology - Steven Levy
Ghost In The Wires - Kevin Mitnick
The Art of Deception - Kevin Mitnick
The Art of Intrusion - Kevin Mitnick
Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter
The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand
It's Not About The Bike - Lance Armstrong
Ultramarathon Man - Dean Karnazes
Charles Proteus Steinmetz: The Electrical Wizard of Schenectady - Robert Bly
Report From Engine Co 82 - Dennis Smith
Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind - Al Ries, Jack Trout and Philip Kotler
The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: Violate Them at Your Own Risk! - Al Ries and Jack Trout
Re-Positioning: Marketing in an Era of Competition, Change and Crisis by Jack Trout and Steve Rivkin
The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding - Al Ries and Laura Ries
Differentiate or Die: Survival in Our Era of Killer Competition - Jack Trout and Steve Rivkin
Marketing High Technology - William H. Davidow
Marketing Warfare - Al Ries
The Discipline of Market Leaders - Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema
Crossing The Chasm - Geoffrey Moore
How to Measure Anything - Douglas Hubbard
Fooled by Randomness - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- It's hard to know what somebody else will find inspiring, but I can share a handful that I personally found to be so:
The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand
It's Not About The Bike - Lance Armstrong
Ultramarathon Man - Dean Karnazes
Charles Proteus Steinmetz: The Electrical Wizard of Schenectady - Robert Bly
Report From Engine Co 82 - Dennis Smith
The Universe Speaks in Numbers: How Modern Math Reveals Nature's Deepest Secrets - Graham Farmelo
The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdos and the Search for Mathematical Truth - Paul Hoffman
The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan - Robert Kanigel
Also, I haven't read it yet myself, but I have heard good things about The Last Lecture[1] by Randy Pausch, and have it queued up to read soon.
- Thanks for submitting this. Personally I am sad to know of this. He had been a personal hero since I have read his book "It's Not About The Bike: My Journey Back to Life" which really helped me go on, one point of my life The world needs heroes they can look upto and this kind of thing can shatter the believes. Lance should have continued the fight if not for himself than for his fans...
- Here's a few I've really liked that have a broader subject matter than only what you asked for. I figure that if you like to read you'd like these books.
--- NON-FICTION ---
Darkness Visible
A Mathemematician's Apology
Omnivore's Dilemma
Fermat's Enigma
The Code Book
Born to Run
Judgement of Paris
Siddhartha
Killing Pablo
The Victorian Internet
Lone Survivor
I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman
Papillon
Into Thin Air
Born on a Blue Day
Touching the Void
Got Fight
The Conquest of Happiness
--- FICTION ---
Switch Bitch
Lost Horizon
The Cuckoo's Egg
The Simlarillion
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Alchemist
The Count of Monte Cristo
A Canticle for Leibowitz
Neverwhere
My Uncle Oswald
Stories of Your Life and Others
Invisible Cities
Life of Pi
Atlas Shrugged
--- WALL STREET / FINANCE ---
When Genius Failed
Liar's Poker
Buffett (Lowenstein)
Bull!
Black-Scholes and Beyond (textbook)
Fixed Income Securities (textbook)
The Road to Serfdom
The Smartest Guys in the Room
Fortune's Formula
The Fourth Turning
Inside the House of Money
--- ENTREPRENEURSHIP / COMPUTERS (non-textbook) ---
Masters of Doom
It's Not About the Bike
Dot. Bomb
Founders at Work
The PayPal Wars
Coders at Work
The Mousedriver Chronicles
Leaving Microsoft to Change the World
The Soul of a New Machine
Startup
The Hypomanic Edge
Small Giants
Small is the New Big
Four Hour Work Week
The Boy who Harnessed the Wind
Four Steps to the Epiphany
Pour your Heart into it
Beyond Software Architecture
Setting the Table
--- DESIGN / UX ---
On Writing
The Design of Everyday Things
Understanding Comics
The Elements of Typographic Style
Don't Make me Think!
A Pattern Language
--- PROGRAMMING ---
Programming Pearls
Effective Java
The Algorithm Design Manual
Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment
The Pragmatic Programmer
Refactoring
Java Concurrency in Practice
Java Puzzlers
Expert C Programming
--- COOKING ---
The Secrets of Cooking Revealed
Cooking for Geeks
The Bread Baker's Apprentice
The Brewmaster's Table
--- MISC ---
Robot Building for Beginners
Mountaineering - The Freedom of the Hills
A First Course in Coding Theory
The Computational Beauty of Nature
Total Control
The Ashley Book of Knots
Make: Electronics
- These might not be biographies but they are good non fiction.
It's not about the bike, my journey back to life. - Lance Armstrong
Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman! - R. Feynman
Into thin air - J. Krakauer
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