My association with Habitat began in 2008, when I received a call out of the blue asking
me whether I’d like to collaborate on a book celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of
the annual Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Work Project. I had heard of Habitat, of course,
but I really knew very little about the organization beyond its association with housing.
As a presidential historian, however, I knew quite a bit about Jimmy Carter, and it took
me only about thirty seconds to recover and say yes. The result was If I Had a Hammer:
Stories of Building Homes and Hope with Habitat for Humanity, published in the fall of
2009.

In researching If I Had a Hammer, I had an important early decision to make: should I
volunteer as part of my research or not? After some back-and-forthing, I decided against
volunteering because I didn’t want my experience to color the stories that other people
were telling me about their experiences with Habitat. So I waited until after the book
was written before traveling to Chiang Mai, Thailand, to volunteer with the 2009 Carter
Work Project. Having talked to so many people about the Carter builds, I thought I knew
what to expect. But there is still a great difference between listening to a description of a
rollercoaster ride and taking the plunge oneself.

It turned out to be a good thing that I postponed volunteering, because my experience in
Thailand gave me a lot to think about. Working hard for ten or more hours a day with two
thousand other people, building a community of eighty-two homes that didn’t exist the
week before, is so thrilling while it’s happening that it inevitably raises the question, Why
can’t my life be like this every day?

Returning from Thailand, I took advantage of the Thanksgiving break to collapse on the
living room couch for a few days. While I dozed, my young children watched holiday
television. One night, they turned to the lighting of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree.
Having grown up in Manhattan, I’d visited the tree many times, and from my Habitat
research I knew that since 2007, Tishman Speyer, the owners of Rockefeller Center, had
donated lumber milled from each year’s tree to build a Habitat home. As I watched the
lighting with my kids, I thought about this remarkable gift and realized that it could be
the touchstone for a different kind of story about Habitat—one that expressed what I had
thought and felt in Thailand.

When I interviewed President Carter for If I Had a Hammer, he told me something that
has stuck with me ever since. He said that the distance between the haves and the have-
nots in our society is so great that no single person can span it by himself. The president
called this gap a “chasm,” and he said that the only way to cross it was over a bridge. He
started the Carter Work Project, he said, because Habitat provides exactly this kind of
bridge, allowing people from both sides to come together and connect with one another in 

President Carter’s insight helped me to make sense of my own experience with Habitat
and thereby inspired The Carpenter’s Gift, which is fundamentally a story about giving
and receiving. Material resources change hands in the story, and they’re certainly
important, but much more important are the feelings that pass between the characters.

For me, the great joy of writing is the opportunity it gives me to express myself. Because
I write primarily history, most of what I express in my work are ideas—intellectual
constructs that attempt to make sense of what has happened and explain why events tend
to take the course they do. With The Carpenter’s Gift, however, I had a chance to express
something else—a feeling, which is altogether different from an idea.

I’ve often thought that people become attached to books for one of two reasons: either
the book teaches them something they don’t know, or it reminds them of something they
already know but have forgotten. Whichever is true, beloved books inspire readers to
become better people. It’s my hope that The Carpenter’s Gift can have a similar effect,
helping young readers learn something they may not know about giving and receiving
and helping older readers remember something they may have forgotten.