Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder is an eye-opening book. You can find it on the “must read,” table at Barnes & Noble. This non-fiction book takes you through the journey of Dr. Paul Farmer’s life. Kidder travels with Farmer and gets to experience many of the great things that Farmer does first hand. Kidder also doesn’t just give the opinions of Farmer and himself, be he gathers information from many other important people in the journey. Farmer studied at Harvard Medical School then worked at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Despite the busy schedule he had in Massachusetts, he devoted a lot of his time to helping start up Partners In Health. Farmer opened a health care center in Haiti and treated everyone. Farmer had a rule that, “Every patient had to pay the eighty cents, except for women and children, the destitute, and anyone who was seriously ill…and no one could be turned away”. He was devoted to his patients, no matter how serious their illness was. Farmer spent a lot of his time trying to come up with a cure for Tuberculosis and Multiple Drug Resistant Tuberculosis. He traveled to many countries, and raised a lot of money. Farmer saved a lot of lives.

This book is true, and it really gave me an understanding of what life is like in a third world country. The only thing that I did not like about the book was how confusing the sentence structure was; I had to reread some sentences multiple times before I understood what it meant. I really liked this book and recommend it, especially to people who want a career that is health related.