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More than anything, the book demonstrates that what Kidder calls “effective idealism” is possible, and that it can be just as infectious as the diseases Farmer treats. Again and again in the book, people come around to Farmer’s way of thinking -- even to his way of life. Ophelia Dahl, the daughter of movie star Patricia Neal and children’s book author Roald Dahl, meets Farmer when she’s 18 and almost immediately thinks, “Oh dear, oh good, my life has changed.” Twenty-three years later, she is executive director of Partners in Health.
Kidder doesn’t deny that he, too, fell under the good doctor’s spell. “The fact is that I came to this project with a certain amount of skepticism,” he says. “Over 30 years of doing this sort of thing, I’ve cultivated quite a lot of skepticism. But the thing about Farmer and company was that they weren’t just talking. They were showing me stuff. And what I really like is that I can’t see the ulterior motive. … The focus is on the patients and the potential patients.”
 Incoming freshmen inspect their copies of the common book at a June 15 orientation. Photo by Kathy Sauber.
Ingebritsen hopes the UW community will find Farmer’s story just as compelling. She wants to see students reading and talking about the book in coffee shops along the Ave., and has been planting copies around campus Johnny Appleseed-style. Every new faculty member has one, she says, as does every department chair in the College of Arts and Sciences. She has approved funding for several new courses that will use it as a text, and has established partnerships with First Year Programs, the UW Alumni Association and the University Book Store to help promote the common book cause. Mountains Beyond Mountains will be on the table in honors discussion groups and Freshman Interest Groups, where students will develop questions to ask Farmer during his Nov. 13 appearance on campus.
The selection of Mountains Beyond Mountains, Ingebritsen points out, is especially timely because it coincides with the founding of the UW’s undergraduate program in global health. Yet the book is about so much more than medicine, she says. It’s about the marriage of morality, intelligence and passion. Of all its qualities, the one she admires most is its versatility as a teaching tool -- between Farmer’s mix of anthropology, epidemiology and ethics, and Kidder’s matchless skills as a reporter and prose stylist, Mountains Beyond Mountains is a one-volume liberal arts education.
“I’m always asked to go out and talk to potential students and their parents,” Ingebritsen says, “and what I tell them is, ‘Find your passion, and a major and then a career will follow.’ And to me, what Paul Farmer’s life represents is that discovery of a passion. That is what I would hope for any student here. And it’s not that I want every student to be Paul Farmer. But I’d like every student to be inspired by him.”
 Author Tracy Kidder. Photo by © Gabriel Cooney.
On the other hand, Mountains Beyond Mountains already has a history of speaking to students at the UW. Jonathan Mayer, a professor of medicine and geography, has been teaching the book since it was first published, and has seen it change lives. His former student Daphne Blake, a 35-year-old senior, says she admires Farmer for his refusal to look at problems in isolation -- to see epidemics, for example, as unrelated to poverty. She wants to apply the lessons of Mountains Beyond Mountains to the work she was doing before she returned to school -- educating child prostitutes in Thailand. “My plan is to develop programs that do more than just give them condoms,” she says.
Sunil Aggarwal, an M.D./Ph.D. student focusing on medical geography, hopes to be an advocate for the reform of drug laws and the humane treatment of prisoners. “I just try to keep a focus on who are the most silenced voices in our society,” he says. “What Dr. Farmer did was bring concepts of suffering and structural violence into polite conversation. He also went down there and did something about it, as opposed to just lamenting it. He’s a hero, for sure.”
Then there’s Everett, the aspiring epidemiologist, whose graduate education will be financed by an ultra-prestigious Gates Cambridge Scholarship. She idolizes Farmer, but can also relate to him.
“I’m 21,” she says, “and he was about the same age when he first started going to Haiti. And it was at that point that he realized, ‘I can do this here.’ To think that he was able to build those hospitals and lead that huge public health intervention down there, all starting so young -- starting with, really, not much more of an education or a background or resources than I have right now -- it’s so inspiring.” • Eric McHenry is associate editor of Columns.
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