Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World

by Tracy Kidder

In the book, a number of heroes don’t look so fine. The French revolutionaries, whose idea of fraternité didn’t include the slaves in St. Domingue, and the Haitian “mulattoes” who went to France to aid those revolutionaries in the hope that they could win the right to own slaves themselves. Woodrow Wilson, who presided over the American invasion of Haiti. Even FDR, who once boasted that, while serving as assistant secretary of the navy, he had written the Haitian Constitution of 1918. (There were others on this list whom Farmer often mentioned elsewhere: the former American slave and great abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who eagerly served as American ambassador to Haiti, in effect representing the Monroe Doctrine there. And Mother Teresa, who came to Haiti in 1981, during the time of Baby Doc, and, as one historian put it, “gushed” over the profligate dictator and his widely hated wife, Michele, who had looted millions from the Haitian treasury for her worldwide shopping sprees. Mother Teresa said Michele had taught her a lesson in humility and marveled at the closeness of the first lady to her people.)