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 Click for words events Ain't no mountain high enough NONFICTION REVIEW
If the nightly news is getting you down--with reports of increasing
casualties in Iraq, the breakdown of peace talks in Israel and ongoing
government warnings about terrorist threats--then turn off the TV and go
buy Tracy Kidder's "Mountains Beyond Mountains," a deeply moving,
inspirational story about a man who doesn't have time to hem and haw
over the world's problems. He's too busy fixing them.
The subject of Kidder's book, Paul Farmer, is a tsunami of a man
disguised as a rail thin, pencil-necked geek. Trained at Harvard in
medicine and anthropology, Farmer has chosen to ply his trades in the
poorest pockets of the world--Haiti, Peru and Siberian Russia, to name a
few. There, he is stemming the tide of drug-resistant tuberculosis,
replacing banana-frond roofs with tin, and ministering to myriad
childhood and adult diseases. Wherever he goes, this Harvard professor
and consultant to the World Health Organization still takes time to walk
days in search of sick patients who have lived their whole lives beyond
the reach of basic medical care. Despite the difficulty of his work, he
never loses steam. "The problem is," Kidder quotes Farmer as saying,
"if I don't work this hard, someone will die who doesn't have to."
Kidder, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and
author of such gems of narrative nonfiction as "Among Schoolchildren,"
"House" and "The Soul of a New Machine," is, yet again, completely
at home in unfamiliar territory. His immersion-style reporting is
tireless, his writing deft and powerful. He evokes a strong sense of
place, reveals characters both wildly engaging and heartbreakingly sad,
and reduces complicated medical terminology and concepts to easily
understandable prose. Through it all, he manages to tell one heck of a
story. Farmer may be the inspiration for this book, but Kidder's
accomplishment as his messenger should also be sung on high. He brings
to vivid life a saint among us, and in times like these, there is no
news we need more. Mountains Beyond Mountains
By Tracy Kidder
Random House, 317 pages, $25.95
Also by Katherine Ozment
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