barbara fister reviewed A Truck Full of Money by Tracy Kidder
Review of 'A Truck Full of Money' on 'LibraryThing'
My fellow-blogger at Inside Higher Ed and an insatiable consumer of books, Joshua Kim, reviewed Tracy Kidderâs new book, A Truck Full of Money, and Iâm glad he did because I found the book frustrating and wasnât sure how to review it. Reflecting on why made me think better of the book and Kidderâs possible purpose. Hereâs how I responded to Joshuaâs request to âplease disagree with this critical review.âreturnreturnIâve finished the book (I got a review copy) and have been struggling to review it because I have the very same reservations Joshua expresses here. I love Kidderâs work. The Soul of a New Machine got at a certain culture with a lot of focus and depth. Home Town looked at lives in a college town â not a single culture at all, but exploring its many sides. Mountains Beyond Mountains was a portrait of a man driven to make …
My fellow-blogger at Inside Higher Ed and an insatiable consumer of books, Joshua Kim, reviewed Tracy Kidderâs new book, A Truck Full of Money, and Iâm glad he did because I found the book frustrating and wasnât sure how to review it. Reflecting on why made me think better of the book and Kidderâs possible purpose. Hereâs how I responded to Joshuaâs request to âplease disagree with this critical review.âreturnreturnIâve finished the book (I got a review copy) and have been struggling to review it because I have the very same reservations Joshua expresses here. I love Kidderâs work. The Soul of a New Machine got at a certain culture with a lot of focus and depth. Home Town looked at lives in a college town â not a single culture at all, but exploring its many sides. Mountains Beyond Mountains was a portrait of a man driven to make the world a healthier, more just place. The trouble for this reader started when Kidder says he wanted to bookend his Soul of a New Machine to show the world of people who write software. As in his other books, he finds someone who can give him a close third person view, a shoulder to peer over. But while he does a good job of telling us about this person, in the end we never know much about the experience of (or the culture of) coding, which makes it hard to find the bookâs soul, itâs motivation. It does bear out Anil Dashâs claim that âthere is no technology industryâ in the way we usually think of it.returnreturnInstead, this guy built a business because he could code, made a lot of money, and thinks about how to spend it. Some of his thinking leads to trying new start ups, some is about how to benefit the poor (which, it turns out, is complicated. Homeless people donât need big schemes as much as they need a pair of socks, and thinking about how to get people socks doesnât jazz up tech entrepreneurs much).returnreturnMaybe Kidderâs point is that this is what bookends the soul of the new machine â a kind of grandiose, meandering, but also highly self-absorbed and often wasteful quest to turn software into money, and what that does to a person.returnreturnThanks for asking, Joshua. I wanted more context from Kidder, plus more about how it feels to code but now Iâm beginning to think Kidder knew exactly what he was doing. It felt soulless, though I did get to know a smart kid who grew up without many advantages in Boston, made a lot of money, and wanted to do something cool with it. Maybe the whole point is that being hit by a truck full of money can be painful. And when we think of software, itâs not about code, itâs about money.