Books About Infrastructure I Keep Recommending
I have a reading habit that I've come to accept as permanent: I'm drawn to books about infrastructure. Not exciting books about technology breakthroughs or visionary founders, but dry, detailed books about the systems that keep civilization running in the background. Water treatment, electrical grids, shipping logistics, postal networks, waste management. The stuff that works so well most people never think about it, and that becomes immediately visible only when it fails. I've been recommending the same handful of books to anyone who expresses even mild curiosity about this subject, so I figured I'd write them down in one place.
The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson. This is probably the most well-known book on this list, and it deserves to be. Levinson traces the history of the standardized shipping container from its development in the mid-twentieth century through its transformation of global trade. The key insight is deceptively simple: before containerization, loading and unloading cargo was enormously labor-intensive, slow, and expensive. The container made it possible to pack goods at their origin, transport them by truck, rail, and ship without unpacking, and deliver them to their destination. This single standardization — agreeing on the dimensions of a metal box — reshaped the global economy. Levinson is thorough, sometimes to a fault. There are chapters on labor disputes at various ports that go into considerable detail about union negotiations. Some readers find these sections slow. I found them fascinating, because they illustrate how a technical change ripples through social and economic systems in ways that are difficult to predict. The book changed how I think about standardization generally.
The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters by Rose George. This is a book about sewage and sanitation, and it is one of the most compelling pieces of nonfiction I've read. George travels the world examining how different societies deal with human waste — from the sophisticated sewer systems of developed nations to the open defecation crisis in parts of South Asia to experimental composting toilets and biogas digesters. The writing is direct and unsqueamish, which it needs to be given the subject matter. What makes the book so effective is George's insistence that sanitation is not a trivial or embarrassing topic but one of the most consequential public health issues in human history. The development of modern sewage systems did more to extend human lifespans than most medical advances. And yet, as George documents, billions of people still lack access to basic sanitation. I've given this book to at least three people. Two of them thanked me. The third said the subject matter was too unpleasant to read about over breakfast, which is fair.
The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Their Energy Future by Gretchen Bakke. Bakke's book is about the American electrical grid — how it was built, how it works, and why it's under increasing strain. The grid is one of those systems most people interact with constantly but understand very little about. You flip a switch and the light comes on, and the staggering complexity behind that is invisible. Bakke makes it visible. She explains the physics of alternating current, the economics of generation and distribution, the regulatory framework governing utilities, and the challenges of integrating renewables into a grid designed around centralized fossil fuel plants. The book is a few years old now and some policy discussions have moved on, but the fundamental portrait of the grid as aging and overstressed remains accurate. The chapters on cascading blackouts — where a single failure propagates through the network — are a good reminder that the systems we depend on are more fragile than they appear.
Neither Snow nor Rain: A History of the United States Postal Service by Devin Leonard. I picked this up at a library book sale and it turned out to be one of my favorite reads of that year. Leonard covers the full history of the USPS, from colonial post roads through the Pony Express era through twentieth century expansion and into modern struggles with declining mail volume. What I found most interesting was the sheer logistical ambition of the postal system at its peak. The idea that you could put a piece of paper in a box on your street and it would reliably arrive at any address in the country within days, for a trivially small fee, is genuinely remarkable. The sorting infrastructure alone — the regional processing centers, the automated sorting machines, the route optimization — is a marvel. Leonard also covers the cultural significance of the postal service in ways I found unexpectedly moving. For much of American history, the mail was the primary connection between people separated by distance. My local post office is a small, quiet building staffed by the same two people every time I go in, and there's something comforting about its continuity.
Drinking Water: A History by James Salzman. Salzman's book examines the history and politics of drinking water — how societies have sourced, treated, distributed, and thought about their water supply from ancient times to the present. The book covers an enormous range of material, from Roman aqueducts to modern desalination plants, from the nineteenth-century discovery that waterborne diseases could be prevented through filtration and chlorination to contemporary debates about bottled water and water privatization. Salzman writes clearly and avoids the trap that some infrastructure books fall into of becoming too technical for a general audience. The chapters on water rights and water law were new territory for me and I found them absorbing, particularly the discussion of how Western states in the U.S. allocate water rights through a system of prior appropriation that dates back to mining camps. The fundamental point of the book — that access to clean drinking water is both a technical and a political problem, and that the technical solutions are often simpler than the political ones — is one that has stayed with me.
There's a common thread running through all of these books, which is that the systems we rely on most heavily are the ones we understand least. Infrastructure is boring by design. When it's working, it's invisible. The pipes carry water, the wires carry electricity, the trucks carry goods, and nobody thinks about any of it. These books make the invisible visible, and in doing so they cultivate a kind of gratitude — or at least awareness — for the extraordinary ordinary systems that make daily life possible. I suspect this is why I keep returning to the genre. In a world that valorizes disruption and novelty, there's something deeply satisfying about reading careful accounts of the things that just work, day after day, because someone designed them well and someone else maintains them faithfully.
If any of these sound interesting, I'd suggest starting with whichever subject you're most curious about. They're all accessible to general readers. None of them require technical background. And all of them will make you notice things in your daily environment that you've been walking past without seeing.
— Kevin Vadala