Another great Kidder book is "House", which applies the same perceptive profiling to the people involved in building a single house -- the couple, the architect

Another great Kidder book is "House", which applies the same perceptive profiling to the people involved in building a single house -- the couple, the architect, and the construction workers. There's an argument that a lot of the best work is done not in pursuit of an external reward but because doing good work is itself rewarding, and one way of viewing these books is as immersive explorations of how that plays out.