Tracy Kidder

"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...

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...

"Good Prose" is an inspiring book about writing--about the creation of good prose--and the record of a warm and productive literary friendship.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “[A] masterpiece . . . an astonishing book that will leave you questioning your own life and political views.”—USA Today
 
“If any one person can be given credit for transforming the medical establishment’s thinking about health care for the destitute, it is Paul Farmer. . . . [Mountains Beyond Mountains] inspires, discomforts,...

Mrs. Zajac is feisty, funny, and tough. She likes to call herself an "old-lady schoolteacher." (She is thirty-four.) Around Kelly School, she is famous for her discipline: "She is mean, bro," says one of her students. But children love her. And so will the reader of this extraordinarily moving book by the author of House and The Soul of a New Machine. Mrs. Zajac spends her working life "among schoolchildren." To some it might seem a small world, a...

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...

"Computers have changed since 1981, when Tracy Kidder indelibly recorded the drama, comedy, and excitement of one company's efforts to bring a new microcomputer to market. What has changed little, however, is computer culture: the feverish pace of the high-tech industry, the mystique of programmers, the go-for-broke approach to business that has caused so many computer companies to win big (or go belly up), and the cult of pursuing mind-bending technological...

"Like Paul Farmer in Mountains Beyond Mountains, Paul English grew up poor, in working-class Boston, but as Tracy Kidder writes, he had "a mind for the age that was coming." Brilliant, reckless, endlessly energetic, Paul English, after Kayak sold for $2 billion, asked himself: What comes next? Start another company? Use his new wealth to make a difference in the world? With a riveting, page-turning narrative and unmatched storytelling skill, Kidder...

Tracy Kidder and Serena Keonig speaking at the "One book, one Lincoln" book talk.