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reidob 's review for:
Mountains Beyond Mountains
by Tracy Kidder
A very fine book that will make you feel utterly inadequate for the ways in which you have wasted nearly every opportunity you have been given to save the world.
Dr. Paul Farmer is a man of huge energy, enormous ambition, blithe disregard for commonly accepted normality, and absolutely no compunction about pissing you off in the process. His only aim is to help the poor, starving, underserved people of this world get what they need. You are either on his bus or off his bus and if it's the latter, he doesn't much care, but you need to stay out of his way. Kidder does an excellent job of bringing this story to the forefront.
Which is not to say Farmer is bossy or pushy—he doesn't need to be. He is just single-minded. There is one question: is what we are doing helping someone who is poor or sick or otherwise deserving? If yes, good. If no, bad. Simple. Don't disturb him with questions of practicality, proportion (they spend $20,000 to transport one gravely ill child, for instance), the balance of resources to need, or any of that stuff. Just do it. And for him, it is working.
Beginning in Haiti, then moving on to Peru and eventually to efforts all over the world, his organization, Partners In Health, is bringing to those who need it the clean water, health care, shelter, and other essentials their own governments and the assistance of other, richer countries such as ours have not been able to pull off. It is an admirable effort, if not entirely replicable (though Farmer would challenge this assertion) because it is based so much on the force of one person's personality.
But, hey, far be it from me to gainsay him any advance he might be making. God knows we have done far too little for far too long. I will now return to feeling entirely inadequate.
Dr. Paul Farmer is a man of huge energy, enormous ambition, blithe disregard for commonly accepted normality, and absolutely no compunction about pissing you off in the process. His only aim is to help the poor, starving, underserved people of this world get what they need. You are either on his bus or off his bus and if it's the latter, he doesn't much care, but you need to stay out of his way. Kidder does an excellent job of bringing this story to the forefront.
Which is not to say Farmer is bossy or pushy—he doesn't need to be. He is just single-minded. There is one question: is what we are doing helping someone who is poor or sick or otherwise deserving? If yes, good. If no, bad. Simple. Don't disturb him with questions of practicality, proportion (they spend $20,000 to transport one gravely ill child, for instance), the balance of resources to need, or any of that stuff. Just do it. And for him, it is working.
Beginning in Haiti, then moving on to Peru and eventually to efforts all over the world, his organization, Partners In Health, is bringing to those who need it the clean water, health care, shelter, and other essentials their own governments and the assistance of other, richer countries such as ours have not been able to pull off. It is an admirable effort, if not entirely replicable (though Farmer would challenge this assertion) because it is based so much on the force of one person's personality.
But, hey, far be it from me to gainsay him any advance he might be making. God knows we have done far too little for far too long. I will now return to feeling entirely inadequate.