Books by Tracy Kidder

“I chose Kidder for this list because of the intensity of his observation, and what this book tells us about research as part of literary nonfiction.” Read more...

The Best Narrative Nonfiction

Peter Hessler, Journalist

“This is a highly acclaimed work by Tracy Kidder. He was embedded in a team at a computer company called Data General (which no longer exists). It was 1979, and they were building a mini-computer. He was introducing to the world this group of people that later became known as ‘nerds’ — though I call them the numerati. These were computer scientists and electrical engineers, and they were putting together this machine that for most of us was utterly foreign back then. We knew NASA used computers; we knew they were important; but they weren’t part of our lives. Kidder was introducing that engineering culture to us — the way they thought, the way they analysed things. It’s a marvelously detailed book, and I found it very inspiring, as I tried to write a book that, in a way, had a similar goal, as I followed a team at IBM that was building a machine. It’s also an interesting way of looking at how computing has utterly changed in the last 30 years. They were building a machine, but all it could do, from our perspective, was count things and put things into columns and calculate stuff. Now these machines are dealing with music and images and ideas and facts. They’ve invaded our world.” Read more...

The best books on Watson

Stephen Baker, Science Writer