PC Book Club: ´Mountains Beyond Mountains´ and ´Eat Pray Love´

There are some books that get a lot of traffic among Peace Corps volunteers.

I'm speaking, naturally, of the typical stories of one person single-handedly saving the world (i.e. Three Cups of Tea); societal examinations (like Freakonomics, The God Delusion); easy-to-read escapes into fantasy, such as Harry Potter (in Spanish, of course), and, – you guessed it – the ubiquitous tales of self-discovery.

Copies of these paperbacks travel from site to site, collecting bits of aerial sand from the desert and dirt smudges from the mountains. Pages are dog-eared and water-stained, riddled with underlines and musings in the margins. Covers are torn with coffee rings. Each one wholly abused and loved, then passed along.

I've read my fair share of "The Peace Corps Classics," along with some pretty terrible chick lit, and I wanted to highlight some of the most impactive books I've read so far.

Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder didn't change my life, but it did shake it up a bit. In this biography of Dr. Paul Farmer, Kidder follows this modern-day public health icon around the world, from Haiti to Boston, Russia to Peru.

I won't bog you down with the details, but trust me, the gist alone is enough to impress you. Farmer built a clinic in the poorest part of the poorest country in this hemisphere and started Partners in Health, an international aid organization responsible for leading the way in some of the worlds largest health problems, like tuberculosis and HIV.

Did I mention that he started all this work as an undergrad? And kept traveling to and from Haiti while attending Harvard Medical School, arriving just in time to take his exams or do his labs and then hopped back on a plane to the Caribbean?

The guy's intimidating. And probably a little crazy. But it's paying off. Partners in Health was a main player in getting the MDR TB drug prices to plummet, making it possible for people in poorer countries to access treatment.

Farmer and his team at Partners in Health have done more for the world in these past two decades than most do in their lifetimes, and are inspiring a lot of people to try and do the same.

Anyway, the point is, this guy redefines the phrase "doing your best." And has made me reevaluate how I view my time here in the Peace Corps. Perhaps not as my one big gesture, but the first of many small ones.

The book is easy to get through when you're not going through an existential crisis. And I recommend it to anyone with any interest at all in global health. Kidder is also a fantastic writer. Even if I had no interest in humanity, I'd still find his portrayal of this superhero/megadork utterly fascinating.


For all two of you on the planet who have yet to read Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, I won't spoil the juicy plot points. But I will tell you it's a basic self-discovery story of a divorcee who finds pleasure in Italy, spirituality in India, and love and balance in Bali.

I totally thought I'd hate it.

But, despite myself, I found it easy to connect with Gilbert. I might not be locked up in an Ashram in India or on the porch of a medicine man in Bali, but I get the need to find a balance between pleasure and discipline and the desire to find God in your circumstances.

When I expected mac and cheese, Gilbert gave me beef stew — meaning, I thought it would be cheesy and unsatisfying, but it was really substantive and gratifying. And her personal story and inner dialogue forced to the surface some thoughts that I, well, needed to think about.

Now I just hope Julia Roberts can do Gilbert justice.