I missed that author Tracy Kidder died a few weeks ago. Kidder wrote the excellent The Soul of a New Machine, which won a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize.
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I remember reading it as a teenager interested in computers and not quite following the whole thing, then rereading it after many years in the tech industry and realizing how well it captured the dynamics of an IT team.
'[I] will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season' has stuck with me since I read it in the 1980s. Computers seemed too exciting then. Not now.
Kidders books had a profound influence on me at the time. A very underrated one is House. So well written. RIP.
I still think about Mountains Beyond Mountains all the time. That book changed the way I thought about a lot of things, and guided a lot of how I approach charitable giving. A titanic subject, sure, but covered with such grace and aplomb. Incredible storyteller.
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