Mountains Beyond Mountains And Strength In What Remains (Essay Sample)

Name
Course
Professor
Date
Book review
The fourth part of Tracy Kidder's Mountains Beyond Mountains, an absorbing biography about one man's tireless efforts to change the way the world's health community ministers to the poor, is wryly titled "A Light Month For Travel." In this section, Kidder witnesses Dr. Paul Farmer journey from a patient's bedside in remote Haiti to a tuberculosis clinic in Peru to lectures and fundraising appearances in the U.S. to a one-night visit with his wife and baby girl in Paris, all before whisking off to a Siberian prison. A classic micromanager, but with global ambitions, Farmer has the résumé (and schedule) of a dozen singularly dedicated men. He works 100-hour weeks that comprise both the smallest details of patient care and conferences that grapple with sweeping issues in world health-care policy.
For someone who has spent his career battling the scourge of cost-benefit analyses, the two roles aren't mutually exclusive: The amount of time, attention, and financial resources dedicated to one patient applies to all patients. In Farmer's mind, there's no such thing as cutting losses, no matter how overextended a caregiver becomes. Writing in the first person, Kidder casts Farmer as a modern-day saint–"I'm not a saint." Farmer protests, with a modesty that only makes him seem saintlier–but with a twinge of uncertainty that comes from being around such a peerless humanitarian. For his part, Farmer seems keenly aware that his very presence sends off shock waves of guilt in "WLs" (white liberals) and other privileged mortals, and he isn't above needling that soft spot to finance his many projects. The shining beacon to his achievements is Zanmi Lasante (Creole for "Partners In Health," the name of his Boston-based organization), a modern Haitian hospital that serves the poorest of the poor, with a catchment area of around one million people.
Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness IS A 304 page book."There are degrees of loneliness," Deogratias, a young medical student from the mountains of Burundi, told Tracy Kidder in one of many conversations that led to Kidder's utterly mesmerizing Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness. "The worst…was to be a poor person oppressed by diseases." In 1994 Deo arrived in New York with $200 and no English, sick, half-starved, and fully traumatized by his months on the run from Hutu militiamen, back and forth across the R...