Tracy Kidder

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy Kidder returns with the extraordinary true story of Deo, a young man who arrives in America from Burundi in search of a new life. After surviving a civil war and genocide, he ekes out a precarious existence delivering groceries, living in Central Park, and learning English by reading dictionaries in bookstores until he begins to meet the strangers who will change his life, pointing him eventually in the direction...

Author Kidder gives us a window onto the paradoxical world of software engineering and Internet commerce, where genius and artistry often mingle with vulgarity and greed, and where Paul English, for all his success, seems at times almost an innocent. Fortune, mania, genius, philanthropy--the co-founder of the travel website Kayak.com grew up in working-class Boston in the 1970s, a boy who rebelled against authority but discovered a world that called...

"When he graduated from Harvard Medical School, Jim O'Connell was asked by the medical school Dean to spend one year setting up a program to care for the homeless population in Boston. It became Jim O'Connell's life calling, to help people known as "rough sleepers." For the past three decades, Dr. O'Connell has run the Boston Healthcare for the Homeless Program, which he helped to create. Affiliated with Massachusetts General Hospital, the program...

Tracy Kidder takes readers to the heart of the American Dream: the building of a family's first house with all its day-to-day frustrations, crises, tensions, challenges, and triumphs. From the first nail to the final coat of paint, blueprints to moving day, Pulitzer Prize -- winning author Tracy Kidder leads readers through the grand adventure of building an American dream.

A Pulitzer Prize–winning author's "touching, funny and inspiring" true story of daily life in a New England nursing home (The New York Times). Ninety-year-old Lou quit school after the eighth grade, worked for the rest of his life, and stayed with the same woman for nearly seventy years. Seventy-two-year-old Joe was chief probation officer in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, holds a law degree, and has faced the death of a son and the raising of a mentally...

The authors share stories from their literary friendship and respective careers, offering insight into writing principles and mechanics that they have identified as elementary to quality prose.