Three Cups of Tea

Title: Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations…One School at a Time
Author: Greg Mortenson & David Oliver Relin
Published: 2006
Pages: 331

“One day in 1993, high up in the world’s most inhospitable mountains, Greg Mortenson wandered lost and alone, broken in boydand psirit, after a failed attempt to climb K2, the world’s deadliest pea. When the people of an inpoverished village in Pkistan’s Karakoram Himalaya tookhim and nursed him backl to health, Mortenson made an impusive promise: He would return one day and build them a school. Althought he was a homeless “climbing bum” living out of his aging Buick in Berkeley, California, Mortesnon sold what few possions he had to launch one of the mos remarkable humanitarian campaigns of out time.

From eerie blue glaciers, where snow leopards stalk their prey, to high-altitude fundamentalist villages, where the faith is a severe as the surrounding, and down the deadly opium trails of Afghanistan at war, Three Cups of Tea traces Mortenson’s decade-long odyssey to build schools, especially for girls, throughout the region that gave birth to the Taliban and sanctuary to Al Qaeda. While he wages war with the root causes of terrorism–poverty and ingnorange–by providing both girls and boys with a balanced, nonextremist education, Mortenson must survive a kidnapping, fatwas issued by engraged mullahs, death threats from Americans who consider him a traitor, and wrenching separations from his family.

Today, as the director of the Central Asia Institute, Mortenson has bult fifty-five schools serving Pakistan and Afghanistan’s poorest communities. And as this real-life Indiana Jones from Montana crisscrosses the Himalaya and the Hindu Kush fighting to keep these schools functioning, he proveds not only hope to tens of thousands of children, byt living proff that one passionately dedicated person truly can change the world.”

I feel almost like a bad person for not liking this book. Of course, I support Mortenson’s goal of educating people so they do not turn to violence (kind of like what some try to do with innercity schools). But I didn’t like Three Cups of Tea.

It read like a features story you’d read in your local paper {although, it’s probably more likely to end up The New Yorker or The New York Times} with all the “Mortenson says.” There isn’t much here to warrent a 350+ page book and I found myself skipping large sections, like Mortenson’s failed relationship before he met his wife. A simple “his girlfriend didn’t understand what he was trying to accomplish/start and, ultimately, left him” would have sufficed.

And the stuff that did interest me was glossed over. Why was the fatwas such a bad thing? And those schools run by the Taliban; how do CAI schools combat those extremist teachings?

Plus, I’m sick of the words “Greg Mortenson”. A third of the way through, the {real} author {Relin} is still immortalizing him by full name. I’m not a big fan of non-fiction but don’t remember this being so irritating in any of the ones I have read. And I, personally, would like to know more about the students he helped. Yes, I know one, supposedly, goes on to be a “maternal doctor” but what of the others?

Mortenson’s story is worth telling. Contrary to the U.S. plan in Afghanistan– get in, bomb the hell out of the land and its people, then on to the next war with, oops, no funds left for rebuilding–”Your President Bush has done a wonderful job of uniting one billion Muslims against America for the next two hundred years.” {pg. 310}–Mortenson is doing what Americans don’t, or won’t.

Yet, I just wish he had found a better way–and a better writer {himself!}–to do so.

Final Rating: 2
Balance of Opinion: Books on the Brain, Semicolon, Lesley’s Book Nook, Leafing Through Life