Books by Paul Farmer

Here, for the first time, is a collection of short speeches by the charismatic doctor and social activist Paul Farmer. One of the most passionate and influential voices for global health equity and social justice, Farmer encourages young people to tackle the greatest challenges of our times. Engaging, often humorous, and always inspiring, these speeches bring to light the brilliance and force of Farmer's vision in a single, accessible volume.A must-read for graduates, students, and everyone seeking to help bend the arc of history toward justice, To Repair the World:* Challenges readers to counter failures of imagination that keep billions of people without access to health care, safe drinking water, decent schools, and other basic human rights; * Champions the power of partnership against global poverty, climate change, and other pressing problems today; * Overturns common assumptions about health disparities around the globe by considering the large-scale social forces that determine who gets sick and who has access to health care;* Discusses how hope, solidarity, faith, and hardbitten analysis have animated Farmer's service to the poor in Haiti, Peru, Rwanda, Russia, and elsewhere;* Leaves the reader with an uplifting vision: that with creativity, passion, teamwork, and determination, the next generations can make the world a safer and more humane place.

To Fool the Rain thoughtfully chronicles Steven Werlin's journey with Fonkoze, but it is also the story of Fonkoze itself. Presented in vivid detail are the lived experiences of Mirlene, Micheline, Ti Rizib, Monique, Rose Marthe, Alta, and other Chemen Lavi Miy participants, who have benefited in many ways from this remarkable program. As Werlin makes clear in To Fool the Rain, there is no single pathway to a better life. The stories of each of these women are the stories of Fonkoze: individual beginnings, challenges, and successes bound together by the themes that pattern life in rural Haiti.Lacking social safety nets, the poor in Haiti and elsewhere face ongoing and catastrophic cycles of poverty and disease. Fonkoze's pioneering work in solidarity with Haiti's poor has been a crucial step in disrupting such cycles. Fonkoze's model, particularly its Chemen Lavi Miy program, offers a path to security and hope for marginalized women. From the foreword by Dr. Paul Farmer

Paul Farmer has battled AIDS in rural Haiti and deadly strains of drug-resistant tuberculosis in the slums of Peru. A physician-anthropologist with more than fifteen years in the field, Farmer writes from the front lines of the war against these modern plagues and shows why, even more than those of history, they target the poor. This "e;peculiarly modern inequality"e; that permeates AIDS, TB, malaria, and typhoid in the modern world, and that feeds emerging (or re-emerging) infectious diseases such as Ebola and cholera, is laid bare in Farmer's harrowing stories of sickness and suffering.Challenging the accepted methodologies of epidemiology and international health, he points out that most current explanatory strategies, from "e;cost-effectiveness"e; to patient "e;noncompliance,"e; inevitably lead to blaming the victims. In reality, larger forces, global as well as local, determine why some people are sick and others are shielded from risk. Yet this moving account is far from a hopeless inventory of insoluble problems. Farmer writes of what can be done in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds, by physicians determined to treat those in need. Infections and Inequalities weds meticulous scholarship with a passion for solutions-remedies for the plagues of the poor and the social maladies that have sustained them.

Pathologies of Power uses harrowing stories of life-and death-in extreme situations to interrogate our understanding of human rights. Paul Farmer, a physician and anthropologist with twenty years of experience working in Haiti, Peru, and Russia, argues that promoting the social and economic rights of the world's poor is the most important human rights struggle of our times. With passionate eyewitness accounts from the prisons of Russia and the beleaguered villages of Haiti and Chiapas, this book links the lived experiences of individual victims to a broader analysis of structural violence. Farmer challenges conventional thinking within human rights circles and exposes the relationships between political and economic injustice, on one hand, and the suffering and illness of the powerless, on the other. Farmer shows that the same social forces that give rise to epidemic diseases such as HIV and tuberculosis also sculpt risk for human rights violations. He illustrates the ways that racism and gender inequality in the United States are embodied as disease and death. Yet this book is far from a hopeless inventory of abuse. Farmer's disturbing examples are linked to a guarded optimism that new medical and social technologies will develop in tandem with a more informed sense of social justice. Otherwise, he concludes, we will be guilty of managing social inequality rather than addressing structural violence. Farmer's urgent plea to think about human rights in the context of global public health and to consider critical issues of quality and access for the world's poor should be of fundamental concern to a world characterized by the bizarre proximity of surfeit and suffering.