Tracy Kidder

Before

Tracy Kidder's book about- Before Tracy Kidder's

book, Mountains Beyond Mountains, before Partners in Health had left Haiti and Peru.

It was still basically in Haiti and Peru and Siberia.

I

was kind of inspired originally by Tracy Kidder and like Tracy, I was a journalist who would sort of home in on something as obscure as making a house and right.

And then, uh write about that in a very journalistic way from everybody's point of view and uh i remember Kidder wrote The Soul of a New Machine, which was about a company, Data General, making minicomputers.

And they had two different teams working on the same thing.

And people are like, but that's not where I live.

And I'm like, well, actually, that's kind of not the point, though, right? Like Tracy Kidder, right? He used to do all of this stuff in and around Massachusetts.

And I'm like, well, but he's not writing about

Massachusetts.

You know?

Well, what I, what I hear in how you're talking about it and what y- your story reflects a lot about what, uh, what Tracy Kidder made a career of, the late Tracy Kidder.

You know, and, uh, even Paul Farmer-

Oh, yes

And, uh, and yeah-

Yes

... and again, a, a, you know, Tracy Kidder made a career out of these backyard narratives of very normal, everyday people going about the work with, with rigor and with passion to make their own little acre of the world a little bit better.

And I, I think that there's something extra beautiful about-

There are also other books.

Tracy Kidder's "The Soul of a New Machine" was a great book about sort of the PC revolution.

I read a lot of sort of history of science, history of innovation books, and I also just tried to, I don't know, write a book that I would want to read.

So it's, it's not a dense, dry history.