Three Cups of Tea

I've recently finished reading Three Cups of Tea. It tells the story of Greg Mortenson, a climber-type guy who, after failing to summit K2 on a climb that he intended to honor his dead sister, ended up staying in a Balti village for some time and deciding to build a school for girls in the village as a better way to honor his sister. After a lot of trial and error figuring out how to raise funds, Mortenson eventually goes on to found the Central Asia Institute, wich has by now built dozens of schools, most for girls, through Pakistan and Afghanistan.

By way of review, I want to quickly get out of the way the fact that the sentences in this book are not great. The prose tends to oscillate between simply declarative and overwrought. And we are told entirely too many times about Greg Mortenson "plunging," "crashing," "plummeting," "drifting," "collapsing," and so on, into sleep.

That being said, it's an engaging read. I got a much better understanding of the incredibly intricate details of the region with respsect to tribal and cultural affiliations and geographic conflicts. Without really psychologizing the thoughts or efforts behind it, Mortenson demonstrates the ways deference to religious and cultural practices can lay the groundwork for real communication. And while the narrative does include the various ways he is met with resistance during efforts to educate girls, on the whole the text reinforces how noncontroversial the idea really is to a vast vast majority of the region's people. It is innovative and it is incredibly impactful, but not, in most cases, controversial.

In conclusion, I would like to recommend Three Cups of Tea. If you both believe very earnestly in the value and impact of education, and you are desperately in need of a story about a person succeeding against incredible odds, those odds created both by systemic issues and bouts of self-indulgence in a feeling of failure - I'm looking at you, academics on the job market - then this might be the right thing for the winter evenings.