Notes from November's Nonfiction Book Discussion

We ended our Nonfiction Book Discussion series for 2007 with an inspiring conversation about Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder.

It is to Kidder's great credit that we talked about Paul Farmer as a complex person whom we admire. We especially respect Farmer's passion and compassion, his ability to connect with people whose backgrounds are different from his own. His insistence upon continuing to treat individual patients in spite of (or perhaps because of) his travel and speaking obligations is a testiment to his commitment to the corporal mercies presented in Matthew 25. As Kidder describes his first impression of Farmer in an interview with BookBrowse.com, "here was a person who seemed to be practicing more than he preached, who seemed to be living, as nearly as any human being can, without hypocrisy." We decided that what some readers see as Farmer's enormous personal sacrifices of time, money, and personal comfort are almost certainly not sacrifices to Farmer himself, that he is living his life exactly as he wants to live it, and that not doing the work he does on behalf of the poor would be the real sacrifice to him.

We also considered Kidder's use of a first person point of view in Mountains Beyond Mountains. We agreed that by including himself and his reactions to Farmer in the narrative, he served to legitimize our own complicated feelings about Farmer. Kidder confirms this intent in the same BookBrowse interview: "After I'd spent a lot of time with Farmer, I began to feel that altruism was plausible after all, indeed maybe even normal. But the sacrifices he's made aren't usual, and I knew that readers of my book would need an everyman, someone a lot less virtuous than Farmer, to testify, in effect, that this guy is for real, and someone who could register the occasional discomfort that anyone would feel in such a person's company."

And we had the special pleasure of hearing about the six months one of our discussion members had spent working as a physician with Doctors Without Borders in Malawi. She had been inspired by Farmer's example and Kidder's book to donate her time and talents to this cause, thus inspiring all of us and proving that one person really can make a difference, not only through his or her own actions but through example.

To learn more about Paul Farmer's nonprofit Partners in Health, visit http://www.pih.org/. The site includes a history of the organization, updates on its current activities, and a wonderful list of recommended reading about such topics as Haiti, Rwanda, HIV/AIDS, and Health and Human Rights.

We hope you will share your reactions to Mountains Beyond Mountains here on the blog as well as tell us your story: Have you ever been so inspired by a book that you felt moved to action? Perhaps you donated your time to a good cause . . . or you set off on a journey . . . or you found a new hobby . . . or you learned a new way of looking at life . . .