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About "One Community One Book"

The Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics and the UT Health Science Center Libraries have partnered together to offer a season of reading and conversation in the Fall of 2008, organized around the book Mountains Beyond Mountains, journalist Tracy Kidder’s chronicle of the life and work of infectious disease specialist and anthropologist Dr. Paul Farmer.

A Haitian proverb lies at the heart of Tracy Kidder’s story about Paul Farmer: Beyond mountains, there are mountains. As you solve one problem, another problem will appear, and so you go on, and solve that problem as well.

The centerpiece event of One Community One Book 2008 at UT HSC will take place at noon on September 22, 2008, when Dr. Paul Farmer and Pulitzer prizewinning journalist Tracy Kidder will present the Frank Bryant Jr MD Distinguished Lecture. Their visit is being hosted by the Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics.

"Community Reading" or "One Book" projects have been held in many different locations across the country since 1998, when they were first introduced by the Washington Center for the Book. They have been sponsored by public libraries, including the San Antonio Public Library, and by college and university libraries. One project in East Lansing, Michigan has actually grown out of a partnership between the city of East Lansing and Michigan State University.

Planning for the One Community/One Book 2008 project at the University of Texas Health Science Center began in January of 2008, when members of the library staff met with Dr. Ruth Berggren, Dr. Jerry Winakur and Lee Robinson of the Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics. Jerry Winakur and Lee Robinson teach Literature and Medicine in the medical school.

The planning committee considered many books, including:

• Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures by Vincent Lam
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
• The Doctor Stories by Richard Selzer
• The Emperor of the Air by Ethan Canin
• The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
• Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder
• Other Woman’s Children by Perri Klass
• Same Kind of Different as Me by Ron Hall, Denver Moore and Lynn Vincent
• The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman
• Too Late to Die Young: Nearly True Tales from a Life by Harriett McBride Johnson
• White Coat, Clenched Fist by Fitzhugh Mullan

As you can imagine, with such a diverse selection of literature, coming to a decision that was satisfying to all the members of the committee was not easy.

The two finalists, Same Kind of Different as Me and Mountains Beyond Mountains, are each, in different ways, stories about healing acts that grow out of personal faith. Choosing between these two stories was not easy.

In the end, we were influenced by the knowledge that Mountains Beyond Mountains has been enthusiastically received in the past by medical students in Dr. Berggren's class, Poverty, Health and Disease, and also by her friendship with Paul Farmer --they were classmates at Harvard Medical School-- which helped a great deal when the time came to set up the author/subject visit.

Dr. Paul Farmer and Tracy Kidder will deliver the Frank Bryant, Jr., M.D. Memorial Lecture at noon on September 22, 2008 in the Health Science Center Auditorium.

We hope this project will be the occasion of many animated conversations, that we will expand our horizons and enrich our relationships as we think and talk about the many interesting issues that are raised through Tracy Kidder's telling of Dr. Paul Farmer's story.