AUGUSTA -- Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy Kidder told a crowd of a couple hundred local readers that "Mountains Beyond Mountains," his book about Dr. Paul Farmer and his efforts at curing infectious disease in some of the world's poorest areas, presented a unique problem.

It was, his editor called it, the problem of goodness. How to write about someone who had lived such a good, productive, moral life of service to others that readers might question the credibility of the author describing him, Kidder.

Surely, someone so virtuous as the single-minded physician must be hiding something. There must be a catch.

"What's the catch?" Kidder said Saturday at an A Capital Read event at the Augusta Civic Center. "I didn't find one. I believe I have the facts on Farmer right. The problem is the average reader might feel Farmer is too much.

"Here's what I did to make my writing credible. I tried to take the reader with me (when he traveled around the world with Farmer as he treated the sick and poor). I tried to make readers feel they were following a little square of light, moving through darkness."

Kidder's "Mountains Beyond Mountains, The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World," is A Capital Read's chosen book for 2007.

A Capital Read started four years ago, is organized by libraries in Augusta and is meant to encourage Augusta-area residents to read the same book and then participate in a number of events based on each book's themes.

"I'm so impressed by the very hardy readers we have in central Maine," Betsy Pohl, director of the Lithgow Public Library in Augusta, said of the roughly 200 people who came out to meet Kidder, despite a storm that left area roads covered in snow, ice and slush.

Kidder owns homes in Maine and Massachusetts.

Kidder's book focuses upon Farmer's tireless efforts to cure infectious diseases such as tuberculosis in Haiti, Cuba, Russia and other destitute parts of the world.

Kidder said Saturday that Farmer is now setting up medical clinics and living in Rwanda, with his wife and child.

The experience of following Farmer, off and on, for three years and exchanging e-mails almost daily for his book has Kidder now sometimes working to help raise funds for the nonprofit Partners in Health organization Farmer and a close group of friends founded.

Kidder recounted an incident that Farmer told him had a major impact on the doctor's life, when Farmer was just 22 and volunteering in Haiti.

A woman's pregnant sister was dying because her family couldn't afford to buy blood for a transfusion she needed. As she watched her sister die she yelled out, in Haitian, "We're all human beings!"

Farmer, in response, raised funds to create a blood bank at the Haitian hospital where he was volunteering.

When he learned the hospital was charging patients for the blood in the blood bank he had raised the funds to create, he vowed to build his own hospital. Which is among the many things Partners in Health has since done under Farmer's leadership.

Keith Edwards -- 621-5647

kedwards@centralmaine.com