Mountains Beyond Mountains
Kidder's portrait of physician Paul Farmer, who devoted his life to bringing medical care to Haiti's poor, is a study in radical moral seriousness. The book asks hard questions about whether one person's heroism can change a broken system. The answer is more complicated than inspiring.
Hero worship is the charge anyway, one reader snapping “get a grip tracy kidder and drop the holier than thou personifications,” another that the book “narrowly escapes being a hagiography,” and a third that “people like the man idolized by this book don't exist.” The second half loses shape into a travelogue. Readers report finishing feeling worse rather than better, since the portrait can “make you feel like a complete waste of carbon atoms” and “run the risk of paralyzing would-be do-gooders instead of inspiring them.” Specific episodes go unscrutinised: “he literally stole hundreds of thousands of dollars in medications,” and twenty thousand spent airlifting one patient “when they did not even have a working ambulance.” One reader's flat verdict: “Paul Farmer has a martyr complex that is not especially endearing.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
