A Truck Full of Money
Tracy Kidder, Random House, 259 pages, $28. Kidder's book begins as a story about Paul English's efforts to cope with his money — he had a net worth of about $120 million after selling Kayak in 2012 — and finding a meaningful way to spend it on philanthropic causes. But soon enough, Kidder's story backtracks, and we find ourselves trying to grasp who English is and what brought him to this juncture of wealth and success. As a writer of clear and engaging prose, Kidder has few peers, but the depth of his reporting — the thousands of anecdotes and facts that he must have collected about his characters, only to discard all but the most penetrating — is what differentiates his books. In the story of English, he gives us such details in a succession of scenes: in the tensions within English's large Irish Catholic family; in the humid air of English's cellar bedroom, where he discovers as a teenager the miracles of computing on a primitive PC; in the account of English as the whiz-kid coder who learns he also has a knack for management as he rises up the ranks of a local tech company called Interleaf. By the time English ventures out as a serial entrepreneur in his 30s, we are reckoning with a complicated fellow. He is brilliant, intense, generous and erratic. He has discovered, too, that he is bipolar and that his manic phases often drive his tremendous proficiency as a web developer but also sometimes debilitating insomnia. We soon see that as much as Kidder's book starts as an inquiry into the generosity of a lucky and talented man, we frequently need to reorient ourselves as readers.
NEW YORK TIMES
