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Tracy Kidder graduated from Harvard and studied at the University of Iowa. He has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Award, and many other literary prizes. His books include The Soul of a New Machine, House, Among Schoolchildren, Old Friends, Home Town, Mountains Beyond Mountains, My Detachment, Strength in What Remains, and (with Richard Todd) Good Prose. Kidder lives in Massachusetts and Maine.
Tracy Kidder's website
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A Conversation with Tracy Kidder, author of Mountain Beyond Mountains
How did you meet Paul Farmer, and what made you want to write about him?
I met him in Haiti in 1994. I was doing a story on American soldiers sent
there to reinstate the country’s democratically elected government. Farmer
showed up one night at the barracks and got into an argument with the commander.
I wasn’t very interested in him then, but a few weeks later I ran into him on
the plane to Miami and I began to learn some of the outlines of his life, which
I found very interesting. Farmer was the second of six children, and spent most
of his childhood in Florida, the whole family living on a bus and a houseboat
that was moored in a bayou on the Gulf Coast. He went to Duke on a full
scholarship, and then, while he was earning his M.D. and Ph.D at Harvard, he
conceived and helped to build an amazing health care system in one of the
poorest corners of Haiti. Around the time when I met him, he and his small band
of colleagues were about to go to war against the dominant ideologies in
international health — eventually they’d actually win some significant
battles.
And I was drawn to the man himself. He worked ...
Izzeldin Abuelaish, MD, MPH, is a Palestinian physician and infertility expert who was born and raised in the Jabalia refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. He received a scholarship to study medicine in Cairo, and then received a ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Mountains Beyond Mountains
Try:
I Shall Not Hate
by Izzeldin Abuelaish
Uwem Akpan was born in Ikot Akpan Eda in southern Nigeria. After studying philosophy and English at Creighton and Gonzaga universities, he studied theology for three years at the Catholic University of Eastern Africa. He was ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Strength in What Remains
Try:
Say You're One of Them
by Uwem Akpan
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