Catching up too

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman.
Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder.

I learned about Philip Pullman while the movie version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was in theaters. He is, according to an article I read somewhere, the atheist answer to C.S. Lewis, a writer of children's books for parents who do not want their children polluted by the lies and hypocrisy of religion. The results are quite good and entertaining; I can recommend The Golden Compass (the first in a trilogy called His Dark Materials) even to those who do not want their childred polluted by the lies and hypocrisy of atheism. The story is well-crafted and suspenseful, the characters are thick and believable, and it is a very fun book to read.

Mountains Beyond Mountains is about the life of Dr. Paul Farmer, a doctor and global health advocate who works ridiculously hard to care for those in the world on the wrong side of "the great epidemiological divide." His story is inspiring and more than a little uncomfortable; Farmer's story has the effect of making you feel guilty, indicted by your wealth and privilege. Reading the book you get the feeling that you aren't doing enough, worse, can never do enough, to earn the medical care and public health you enjoy on your side of the great epi divide. Kidder's prose is not ostentatious but still delightful to read; he draws you in to the true story, reveals not just the actions of his protagonist but also his motivations. The focus is always on Farmer, but Kidder gives you just enough of his own experiences and feelings to put the events and feelings into a friendly human perspective.

A small and fairly contrived connection between the two books: In The Golden Compass, the Church is always evil like Mordor is evil in The Lord of the Rings; there is no moral complexity, no admission that maybe some religious people are pretty okay some of the time. In Mountains Beyond Mountains, though Farmer's work is amazing and is rightly the focus of the book, in his story there are others who are important, in particular an Anglican priest in Haiti and a Catholic priest in Peru, who are not just helpful but completely essential to Farmer's success. So in Pullman's fiction, the Church is always hurting and oppressing; in Kidder's nonfiction, the Church is sometimes working very hard to heal and to save.