A Truck Full of Money
Tracy Kidder, Random House, 288 pages, $28. Before the sensibility of Tracy Kidder's new book clearly emerges, and before its subject, Paul English, becomes endearingly familiar, you may be tempted to put it down. The first few chapters of "A Truck Full of Money: One Man's Quest to Recover From Great Success" have the sound of a glossy business-magazine hagiography. It takes a while to realize that English, a founder of the travel website Kayak.com, actually is a sensitive, maddening, loopy sort of whiz. He really doesn't care much about money, and he really does seem delighted to give it away. But it's a mistake for Kidder, a Pulitzer Prize winner, to strike such a gushing tone as he introduces us. There's been far too much slobbering over barons of the new economy in the last 15 years for readers to understand that this narrative may be slightly different. There is, however, an element of English's story that's quite striking, one that makes "A Truck Full of Money" feel very much like a Tracy Kidder book. In his 20s, English was told he had bipolar disorder. For a long time, he kept his diagnosis a secret. But today, he is wonderfully open and courageous about it. Many of Kidder's subjects are coiled with enough energy to launch a missile, of course, but English has a psychiatric diagnosis to go with it. The questions Kidder raises — Are English's manic spells responsible for his entrepreneurial boldness? Or does he succeed despite them? — are well worth probing, and Kidder's portrayal of living with manic depression is as nuanced and intimate as a reader might ever expect to get.
NEW YORK TIMES
