SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
A best-selling author and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist has died. Tracy Kidder wrote celebrated books about topics ranging from the rise of corporate technology to the crisis of unhoused people in America. NPR's Neda Ulaby has our remembrance.
NEDA ULABY, BYLINE: When Tracy Kidder took readers into a deep dive about the development of a mini-supercomputer, it was 1981. Very few people had computers in their homes. His main characters were nerdy engineers, but Kidder told NPR the year the book came out that he was awed by their work.
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TRACY KIDDER: In the book, actually, I compare it to the people who made the cathedrals in Europe. But I don't mean by that to intimate that a computer is anything like one of those wonderful cathedrals. I mean, it has a very short, useful life, and it's not anywhere near as beautiful, I'm sure.
ULABY: Kidder followed his breakthrough book, "The Soul Of A New Machine," with one about builders constructing a custom house.
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KIDDER: Building a house, this custom building situation, is a very emotional endeavor.
ULABY: Kidder told NPR in 1985 he was sucked into its emotional journey and power dynamics.
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KIDDER: You know, it's a tremendously intimate process that's being conducted by people who are really strangers. I mean, there are all these strangers meeting under an incipient roof.
ULABY: But it was stories of people who did not have roofs or other basic human needs that would define much of Kidder's career. The writer came from a well-off family in Long Island. He went to Harvard, then to the Vietnam War. Kidder spent a year reporting a best-selling book about a fifth grade, low-income classroom. And he wrote influential books about heroes of public health, like Dr. Paul Farmer. Kidder talked with NPR in 2003 about visiting Farmer's organization Partners In Health in Haiti.
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KIDDER: You drive from Port-au-Prince, and it takes about three hours. It's only, I think, 40 miles. So you can imagine what the road is like. It's like a dry river bed. And you come through a landscape that's largely been deforested, where people are clearly hungry. After a while, you realize there's no electricity out there. It's quite shocking, actually. Almost biblically shocking.
ULABY: Kidder managed to bring that shock home to readers in his book called "Mountains Beyond Mountains," but also what happens when someone refuses to look away.
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KIDDER: Suddenly, you come upon this oasis, this thing that looks like a fortress on a mountainside, which is the medical complex that Partners In Health created there in the central plateau of Haiti - one of the poorest parts of Haiti. And it's just a tremendously exhilarating feeling to come upon it.
ULABY: Kidder brought Farmer's work around the world very close to readers. He brought them into the pulsing, hurting, resilient heart of every place he went. Tracy Kidder died Tuesday in Boston. The cause was lung cancer. He was 80 years old. Neda Ulaby, NPR News.
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