Books › The Soul of a New Machine
The Soul of a New Machine
471 pages
A caffeinated, high-stakes race against time that captures the obsessive, exhausting thrill of bringing a new creation into the world.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like being locked in a fluorescent-lit basement lab with a team of brilliant, sleep-deprived obsessives. It is a caffeinated, propulsive journey into the heart of the engineering process, capturing the sheer psychological toll and exhilarating rush of building something from nothing. The narrative hums with the same frantic energy as the engineers it profiles, translating the dry mechanics of circuit boards and microcode into a gripping human drama about ambition, sacrifice, and the elusive 'pinball' reward of getting to play the game again. It will thoroughly delight fans of literary journalism who crave deep dives into subcultures, offering a timeless, empathetic portrait of the beautiful, destructive drive to create.
- Mood
- caffeinated
- obsessive
- high-stakes
- claustrophobic
- intense
- Tone
- observational
- urgent
- empathetic
- journalistic
- admiring
- Pace
- propulsive
- Themes
- the psychology of obsession · creative burnout · the art of engineering · extreme teamwork · the drive to invent
- The writing
- Lucid and narrative-driven, translating complex technical minutiae into gripping, character-focused human drama.
- The arc
- Begins with the daunting scale of an impossible challenge, accelerates into a fever-pitch of obsessive creation, and resolves in a bittersweet, exhausted triumph.
- Who it's for
- Anyone fascinated by the obsessive lengths to which brilliant people will go to build something new, and fans of narrative non-fiction that reads like a thriller.
Content notes
- workplace stress
- burnout
About the book
"The Soul of a New Machine" is a non-fiction book written by Tracy Kidder and published in 1981. It chronicles the experiences of a computer engineering team racing to design a next-generation computer at a blistering pace under tremendous pressure. The machine was launched in 1980 as the Data General Eclipse MV/8000. The book won the 1982 National Book Award for Non-fiction and a Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.
Description from Open Library.
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