The title Mountains Beyond Mountains comes from a Haitian proverb and is a metaphor for life’s challenges. Once you have scaled one mountain, you reach a place where you can see that there are always more mountains farther away: you will never stop climbing, never be finished. In the case of Paul Farmer, whose visionary spirit is the subject of this book, his mountain is the struggle to provide medical help to all desperately poor people. In fact, the man Tracy Kidder writes about in this nonfiction account is something of a secular saint, for Paul Farmer really only comes alive when he is tending to the illnesses of people the rest of the world has forgotten.
During the years chronicled in the book, Farmer crosses the globe many times, from
