Kidder makes it clear that Kayak was another man’s idea, not English’s, and that he was lucky to make tons of money before the dot.com bust. This author holds to his unusual contract with his subject. His is a seemingly artless art, like John McPhee’s, that conceals itself in sentences that are necessary, economical, and unpretentious. Kidder’s prose glides with a figure skater’s ease, but without the glam. (The only thing off-limits is English’s first marriage we’re not even told the woman’s name.) So the book has an absorbing fly-on-the-wall feel, as Kidder observes English pitching ideas to hedge funds, exhorting programmers to strive for excellence, and exchanging e-mails with key lieutenants. Before agreeing to the project, English made Kidder promise “not to make me look better than I am.” The ambitious and troubled English gave the author nearly unlimited access to his world, both professional and personal. Kidder knows a good subject when he sees it. Tom White (no relation), a legendary Boston philanthropist and fellow depressive, turned into a mentor in how to mute the effects of the disease and how to give away lots of money. Off the drugs, he sometimes stared into the night, hoping the “black dog” would eventually slip away.īrenda White, one of his engineers and later romantic partner, suggested meditation, which offered temporary relief. Psychiatrists prescribed drugs, which rarely helped instead, they turned him into a sluggish replica of himself. It hardly mattered that he couldn’t sleep. Pumped up by grandiosity, he felt as if anything was possible.

In the latter phase, he would feel “on fire,” burning with ideas for new start-ups and drinking too much. The difference between “the exuberant and hypomanic Paul,” Kidder notes, “wasn’t always obvious.” Employees or bankers unaware of his condition might applaud his “force field of energy” without understanding what lay behind it. His bipolar disease, not diagnosed until adulthood, could either drive him to inventive breakthroughs or lay him low with depression. These two proved essential to English’s success, as low-key, stabilizing counterweights to his volatile personality. Soon enough he had earned a master’s degree and was making good money during the ’90s in Boston’s high-tech economy, and then was forming start-ups with Billo as engineering chief and Paul Schwenk as business chief. At UMass-Boston, English discovered and honed his enormous talent for programming.

A truck full of money by tracy kidder