Are you in the market for a hero...

If you haven’t yet heard of Paul Farmer, you’ll want to know about this inspirational man. 

In Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World, Tracy Kidder honors a man who has taken on the problems of the poorest of the poor.  A brilliant, preternaturally energetic man, Farmer attended Harvard Medical School, spending much of his school years in Haiti, where he put his knowledge of infectious disease to work.  There he did pioneering work on the connection between poverty and disease.

In Cange, Haiti’s poverty stricken central plateau, he built public health facilities to battle HIV/AIDS and multidrug-resistant tuberculosis.  His community-based health care system enlists townspeople to deliver medications and food daily to the sick in their homes, to be certain they take required doses and get the nutrition so essential to good health. 

Farmer was also partly responsible for establishing Partners in Health, a fundraising organization that now collaborates with major international health organizations.  He has exported this successful treatment protocol to jails in Siberia and shantytowns in Peru. (Since the book, their efforts have spread to Guatemala, Rwanda, Mexico, and Boston.) Kidder spent a lot of time with Farmer. 

A gifted writer, Kidder captures the essence of the man.  He shows how it’s possible for one person to achieve so much and still have time for intimate connections with those he cares for.  Kidder also makes clear the relationship between disease and poverty, and the miracle Farmer has brought about in finding a way to battle them both.