Tracy Kidder's Mountains Beyond Mountains

The main character and protagonist, Jon Krakauer, is a United States client and journalist who is on an expedition to climb to the summit of Mt. Everest. He takes the reader through his horrifying experiences on the mountain, including the death of his team, lack of oxygen, and horrible weather. The conflict in this novel is an internal and external conflict. It is an internal conflict of man vs. himself. Jon Krakauer, had to go through mental states of giving up and dying on the mountain

Dr. Farmer understood that their horrid living conditions would have to change in order for his patients to heal. Dr. Farmer knew that Haiti itself would be unable to make this transition, which is why relying on the wealth, generosity and action from others around the world, to provide adequate necessities for the Haitians became such an important task. When his patients were given a better quality of life, they began to maintain health. For most Americans, we would be unable to fathom the undesirable living conditions, but at the same time understand why diseases run rampant in such an awful economic environment. Without the interdependence of the wealthy around the world and humanitarian belief that we are all human and deserve to be treated with equality, compassion and love, Dr. Farmer may not have been able to succeed as well as he did in Haiti. Kidder (2003) states “You want to see where Christ crucified abides today? Go to where the poor are suffering and fighting back, and that’s where he is (pg. 79).”

If a health clinic providing basic services to the world’s most vulnerable people is withheld the large amount of foreign assistance that currently comes from the United States government, all diseases will flourish, including epidemics such as Zika and Ebola (Barry-Jester, 2016). We contribute to more unstable political environments (Crimm, 2007, p.615) and more refugees that we increasingly refuse to help when we take away aid that would countries meet the needs of their citizens.

Stories never told. Songs never sung. Dances never performed. Such was the crippling reality N. Scott Momaday faced with his grandmother’s death. Her culture, her customs, her traditions, were gone and lost to the world. Yet the memories were still alive. In The Way to Rainy Mountain, Momaday writes about his grandmother’s past, the Kiowa tribe and his experience with its tradition, and his journey to the Rainy Mountain. Through the use of strong sensory detail, figurative language, and unique word choice, Momaday both displays the nuances of the Kiowa tribe and culture, and reconnects back to his ancestry.

Many contemporary stories today contain characters that attempt to achieve their goal through love and compassion. This is a large contrast to the heroes seen in ancient epics who achieve their goals through violence or their own physical actions. It might be because what audiences today value most in role models is much different than what audiences who lived centuries ago valued. Nowadays, people strive to see characters focus on loving and taking care of others to get what they want. In fact, people can gain this satisfaction through people they can possibly meet in real life. Tracy Kidder, the author of the book Mountains Beyond Mountains, introduces his audiences to Dr. Paul Farmer, a man accountable for his tremendous work for his

“The only real nation is humanity” (Farmer 123). This quote represents a huge message that is received in, Tracy Kidder’s, Mountains Beyond Mountains. This book argues that universal healthcare is a right and not a privilege. Kidder’s book also shows the audience that every individual, no matter what the circumstances, is entitled to receive quality health care. In the book Kidder represents, Paul Farmer, a man who spends his entire life determined to improve the health care of impoverished areas around the world, namely Haiti, one of the poorest nations in the world. By doing this the audience learns of the horrible circumstances, and the lack of quality health care that nations like Haiti

Jiní. Jiní, jiníigo éí t'óó ájíi łeh jiní. Eí biniinaa doo jiní jiníida, jiní. Translated into: he said, she said, when you say he/she you are just making it up they say. So that's why you do not say she said he said, they say (Navajo Word of the Day).

Paul Farmer came from a family who had little to offer him beside their outpouring love and sense of adventure. He had many places to call home, and would never really get comfortable in one spot because often his family would pick up and move. Farmer was inspired by great leadership, his father, growing up and would in turn become a great leader on his quest to rid the world of poverty and illness. Mountains Beyond Mountains written by Tracy Kidder, depicts Farmer’s mission to provide health care internationally and talks about all the difficulties that Farmer and his team had to overcome.

Adequate health care for the poor is an issue that the whole world has been fighting for a very long time. There are many people that go without proper health care on a daily basis, leaving them susceptible to serious illnesses such as tuberculosis. In the book Mountains Beyond Mountains Dr. Paul Farmer understood just how crucial it was to provide decent health care for the needy. Many choose to believe that the lack of proper care only affects third world countries.

The two quickly bonded over being the children of immigrant parents, Sanger’s from Ireland and Bill’s from Berlin. The two also shared a wariness of organized religion and a support of the socialist party. Throughout Bill’s courting of Sanger she was suffering from a rare and deadly form of tuberculosis, the same disease that killed Sanger's mother. This may have prompted Sanger’s willingness the marry Bill before she finished her schooling. Soon after their marriage Sanger became pregnant with her first son Stuart Sanger.

Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder is a biography written in 2003 about a benevolent Haitian doctor named Paul Farmer. In the first person point of view of Kidder, Kidder writes about Farmer’s beliefs, goals, and life events that relate to his work in Haiti. Even though Farmer, along with many other characters in Mountains Beyond Mountains, is clearly an optimistic person, Kidder struggled with seeing the hope and reason behind trying so hard to solve things that seemed obviously impossible to him. As a result, the constant interactions between pessimistic people and positive people, combined with the pessimistic character eventually becoming positive, shows that Kidder uses juxtaposition to prove that, to a very high extent, Kidder constantly reflects upon the

I chose to read The Lassa Ward: One Man’s Fight Against One of the World’s Deadliest Diseases for the AP Human Geography summer assignment. The Lassa Ward is authored by Ross I. Donaldson, who holds doctor of medicine and master of public health degrees from the University of California Los Angeles. The novel was published by St. Martin’s Press in New York, NY in 2009. Dr. Donaldson’s memoir focuses on how he treated Lassa cases in Sierra Leone, in the midst of an outbreak of the virus during the summer months of 2003. Through explanations of his surroundings and the ward where he treated his patients, the book addresses the medical need of the region by describing the primitive condition of medicine occurring in the third-world country that

One person I greatly admire is Dr. Paul Farmer. As a junior in high school, I applied and was admitted into a Pre-College Program at Harvard University. This was a two week full immersion into the college atmosphere at Harvard. The Pre-College Program involved a three hour class of your choosing with three to four hours of homework each night. Part of each night’s assignment was reading a book called Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder. Mountains Beyond Mountains is a biography on Dr. Paul Farmer with an emphasis on his work in the third-world country, Haiti. The biography depicts how Dr. Paul Farmer balances his time between affording the lifestyle he wants to live and following his passion for helping individuals who are in need.

People often feel connected to land. Cultures have a deep appreciation for their homeland. In the United States, Native Americans often express great respect for the land and for nature. They see the land as something sacred, an entity that binds them to their culture and history. In Native American stories, nature serves as a way of connecting to the past, as seen in The Way to Rainy Mountain, Crow Testament, and I Was Sleeping Where the Black Oaks Move.

These major themes are structural violence, bearing witness, the provision of pragmatic solidarity, inequality and health as a human right. Farmer also raises the use of voices and ethnography, the emphasis on history, individual human agency, and the study of suffering itself. The text is really a call to attention of the root causes of suffering and social injustice in the world, as well as a call to medical and aid workers to break their relative silence on the inequity and inequality in the distribution of health care services in the developing world. What strikes one most in reading Pathologies of Power is Farmer’s contention that the powerful have, through structural violence, formalized a situation whereby equity is denied certain groups.