Mountains Beyond Mountains: the Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World, by Tracy Kidder (New York: Random House, 2003)
Mountains Beyond Mountains tells the story of Dr. Paul Farmer – his unusual childhood, initial work in Haiti, the formation of Partners in Health, and continuing challenges in Haiti, Peru, Africa, and Russia. It’s an inspiring book, acknowledging that answers exist, however slowly they arrive and begin to make a difference; offering hope for the future of “the only real nation [of] humanity;” and gently urging readers to action.
One time I listened to Farmer give a talk on HIV to a class at the Harvard School of Public Health, and in the midst of reciting data, he mentioned the Haitian phrase ‘looking for life, destroying life.’ Then he explained, ‘It’s an expression Haitians use if a poor woman selling mangoes falls off a truck and dies.’ I felt as if for that moment I could see a little way into his mind. It seemed like a place of hyperconnectivity. At moments like that, I thought that what he wanted was to erase both time and geography, connecting all parts of his life and tying them instrumentally to a world in which he saw intimate, inescapable connections between the gleaming corporate offices of Paris and New York and a legless man lying on the mud floor of a hut in the remotest part of remote Haiti. Of all the world’s errors, he seemed to feel, the most fundamental was the ‘erasing’ of people, the ‘hiding away’ of suffering. ‘My big struggle is how people can not care, erase, not remember.’ – from Mountains Beyond Mountains, by Tracy Kidder
Related Websites
Publisher’s Website
Partners in Health