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Title: Mountains Beyond Mountains: Healing the World: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer by TRACY KIDDER ISBN: 0-375-50616-0 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 09 September, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.47 (36 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: I nominate Paul Farmer for sainthood
Comment: Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy Kidder tells us about Dr. Paul Farmer, an infectious disease specialist who has been working in Haiti since 1982. Farmer founded an apolitical organization that's the only source of medical care for hundreds of thousands of peasants. For his Herculean efforts, in 1993 he received a Genius Grant from the MacArthur Foundation - and of course he plowed the money right back into his organization.
That Farmer has chosen this path is not so surprising when one considers his unconventional childhood, which included living on a leaky boat and in a bus. As a scholarship student at Duke (anthropology major), he worked in the NC tobacco fields with Haitians. After graduation, he spent a year in Haiti and then went to Harvard Medical School. He's married and has a child, but he sees them infrequently; he rarely sleeps, is a workaholic (duh!), and seems to inspire an uncommon degree of devotion among his coworkers and his patients.
Buy this book, and be aware that part of your money will doubtless find its way back to Haiti. Then send an additional donation to Partners in Health.
Rating: 5
Summary: both thrilling and important
Comment: You might think the story of a caregiver in the poorest country in the western hemisphere would be depressing. You might think that learning about the "Global ATM"-- aids, tuberculosis, and malaria-- and that these three diseases kill six million poor people a year, would be depressing.
Yet, the story of Paul Farmer is energizing, and will leave you breathless as you see the human potential of one person to make an enormous difference. Tracy Kidder is at his best in this book, and does a magnificent job covering different shades of character and events.
And finally, this book is also a love story with the Haitian people, a people cursed by 200 years of bad government and western imperialism, for whom even the smallest effort and assistance will save many lives.
Please read this book, and buy it as a present for those you love. It can change your world.
ps, see www.paulenglish.com/travel/haiti/ for info about my first trip to Haiti, taken as a result of this book.
Rating: 4
Summary: Inspiring, emotional, flawed, but recommended
Comment: The work of Paul Farmer and the conditions in the world that motivate him are presented in a compelling eye-opening narrative that makes a good read.
However, the reader is not sure if this is a Tracy Kidder journal about a Tracy Kidder life experience or a biography about Paul Farmer. In the two other Kidder books I read and loved (Soul of a New Machine and House), there was no Kidder, just wonderfully interwoven narrative and factual background. In Mountains, Kidder keeps intruding in the first person, and I find it distracting. And, if one is to assume that there was an editorial decision to include Kidder at the expense of something else, WHERE is Farmer's wife Didi and daughter Catherine? We hear about a one-night stopover from Haiti to Russia and a vague reference to summers together in Haiti. If that's all there is, then surely Farmer and Didi must have some feelings about this. I would have much rather seen some of the book devoted to this than Tracy Kidder's fitness level when hiking the central highlands. And without more on that personal side of Farmer, we are left with too much of Kidder's observations and conclusions, and not enough with which to get our own full, emotionally complete portrait. I kept looking in the back for a couple of more chapters.
That criticism aside, Kidder is an author who always deserves attention, and has focused his attention on a truly remarkable man and story. I do recommend this book, and just allow myself the fantasy of being the editor and demanding a bit more Farmer and family and a bit less Kidder.
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Title: Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor by Paul Farmer ISBN: 0520235509 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: 01 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $27.50 |
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Title: Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues, Updated Edition With a New Preface by Paul Farmer ISBN: 0520229134 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: 05 February, 2001 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: The Uses of Haiti, Updated Edition by Paul Farmer ISBN: 1567512429 Publisher: Common Courage Press Pub. Date: 15 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: The Namesake : A Novel by Jhumpa Lahiri ISBN: 0395927218 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co Pub. Date: 16 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: The Known World by Edward P. Jones ISBN: 0060557540 Publisher: Amistad Press Pub. Date: 14 August, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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