The best non-fiction author in this country is Tracy Kidder. Practitioner of what has been called fly-on-the-wall reporting, Kidder has spent a year (or more) with the computer engineers and software authors who created one of the first PCs (Soul of a New Machine). Kidder received the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction and moved on to year with the architects, builder, and their client as they created a home (House) in the Berkshires in Massachusetts. Kidder moved on to a Boston suburb and spent a year in an elementary school classroom (Among Schoolchildren). From schoolchildren to residents of a nursing home, Kidder spent a year among the oldest among us (Old Friends). From the nursing home, Tracy Kidder took his readers to a college town—Northampton. MA: the home of Smith College, a picture-postcard sidewalk cafe-strewn, crafts boutique and bookstore-brimming tourist Mecca (Home Town). Kidder takes his readers from Northampton, where everything works, to Haiti (Mountains Beyond Mountains), where nothing works. In this most recent book—the first to deal with a subject outside the United States—Kidder introduces Dr. Paul Farmer and his work among the poor of Haiti. Tracy Kidder is a national treasure; Pulitzer Prizes and National Book Awards aside. Read any or all of his books and see what you think. If this be (fair & balanced) admiration, so be it.
Kidder, Tracy. Among Schoolchildren. Boston : Houghton Mifflin Co., 1989.
________. Home Town. New York : Random House, 1999.
________. House. Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1985.
________. Mountains Beyond Mountains. New York : Random House, 2003.
________. Old Friends. Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1993.
________. The Soul of a New Machine. New York : Modern Library, 1981.
