House

If anyone deserves to be compared to John McPhee, Tracey Kidder does. His non-fiction prose comes closest to McPhee's in engaging the reader and making the most minute detail seem fascinating.

Aside from the pure pleasure of reading, "House" is also a manual for how and how not to build a house. Every time I have a problem in the construction of my house, I think back to the shabby, confrontational way the builders were treated in "House" and approach my builder with that in mind.

When I first read House I was enthralled. Finally, a book about the building of a house from inception to possession. I started to use excerpts from the book in my high school construction classes, and then bought 35 copies to use with my students. I now have the book broken down into about 25 lessons and read it each year with my new classes. It adapts very well in a construction technology program for Vocational high school students, and with the current emphasis on literacy we get an added bonus. Thank you Tracy Kidder, you have helped many students over the past 5 years.

If you are thinking about becoming a builder, or are thinking about having a house built for you, this is a must-read. Be prepared for Kidder's no holds barred account of how devious a home buyer can be just to save relatively little money, how unprepared a builder can be to deal with such situations, and what crucial role good communication between the home buyer, architect, and builder plays getting the project completed on time and on budjet. Kidder emphasizes the fact that building a house is not just about people doing buisiness in an impersonal manner, but that personalities play a crucial role in any business relationship. Kidder also makes clear that the involved parties' abilities to see the other sides point of view in a dispute are paramount to achieving the ultimate goal in business: the customer gets a quality product on time and no one feels they're cheated at the end of the transaction. This is not an instruction manual; Kidder offers little advice on what is proper or what the characters could do better. Kidder simply relates an accurate account of the process of building a home, mostly with an eye toward human relations; a wise reader will learn from the successes and mistakes of the characters herein.

This was a great book and fun to read. If you want to know what its like to build a house from scratch...this book paints the picture in words. The people are real, what happens is real, the feelings are real and they come out on each page. This is reality literature years before T.V. ever caught on.

It strikes me as an honest and balanced view of the world of constuction. Kidder does a great job at expressing the problems inherent in awarding construction contracts on the basis of hard bidding. The owners, in this story, get really lucky by hiring honest decent contractors who work hard to earn their money. In the end, its a happy world, but the ride is a bumpy one.

Bottom line, one of the best books I've ever read. A must read for all you aspiring contractors, and architects out there.

I read this book when it came out thirteen years ago and I enjoyed every minute.

In this book, Tracy Kidder describes the process and personalities involved with building a new home, but it's more than that. Like his "Soul of a New Machine", it chronicles what it's really like to be caught in the middle of a major project. Even someone who hasn't built a home from scratch or developed a new computer system will gain an basic knowledge of the topic and an appreciation for what it takes to do something really big.