February 22, 2007
‘Common book’ author Kidder on campus Feb. 27
One day some years ago, Tracy Kidder hiked five hours through the steep, barren mountains of Haiti with Dr. Paul Farmer, who wanted to learn why a patient wasn’t taking his tuberculosis medicines. Another time, Kidder hiked 11 hours with Farmer to see the living conditions of a certain Haitian family. Many members of the family had been ill with TB, and Farmer aimed to intervene.
Journeys with Farmer were often both physically and emotionally arduous for Kidder, but they led to one of his most famous books, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, the Man Who Would Cure the World.
Kidder will speak at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 27. It’s the next official event in the first year of the UW Common Book program, which brings groups ranging from freshmen to alumni together to talk about one book. Billed as A Conversation with Tracy Kidder, the evening will feature the author talking with Nick DiMartino, book buyer at the HUB branch of University Bookstore; Kate Baber, a UW senior in public health and anthropology; and Audrey Young, an assistant professor of medicine at UW and an attending physician at Harborview Medical Center interested in the treatment of poor and uninsured patients.
A Pulitzer Prize winner and one of the best-known nonfiction writers in America, Kidder first came across Farmer in 1994 while writing about American military operations in Haiti. Kidder had seen the soldiers doing their best in a chaotic, apparently hopeless country. “I felt as though, in Farmer, I’d been offered another way of thinking about a place like Haiti,” writes Kidder in Chapter 1 of Mountains Beyond Mountains. “But his way would be hard to share, because it implied such an extreme definition of a term like ‘doing one’s best.'”
In Mountains Beyond Mountains, Kidder takes the reader on a journey, following Farmer as he shuttles between teaching Harvard medical students about infectious diseases and ministering to patients at Zanmi Lasante, the clinic that Farmer and his nonprofit, Partners in Health, founded in the remote village of Cange. Kidder also watches as Farmer collars money and equipment for his clinics, and works with global health experts on seemingly intractable epidemics such as HIV/AIDS.
Kidder repeatedly finds himself shocked by the poverty in Haiti — beggars, open sewers, malnourished children. He’s also amazed by Farmer’s aggressive determination to fight disease, not just globally, but one patient at a time. He and Farmer become friends, enough that they talk not only about poverty but Farmer’s seemingly quixotic attempts to obliterate it.
During the 11-hour hike, Farmer allows that there’s much defeat in what he does. But he tells Kidder, “I’m not going to stop because we keep losing. Now I actually think sometimes we may win. I don’t dislike victory.”.
Sweating along the way to dehydration, Kidder takes in the scale and difficulty of Farmer’s determination. “I like the line about the long defeat,” he tells the physician.
The evening with Kidder is sold out. For more information on Paul Farmer, Tracy Kidder and the UW Common Book Program, visit www.uwcommonbook.org
