A vividly poignant odyssey of seismic proportions -- Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace. . . One School at a Time, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, is as impressive a novel as it is a text book. Do not let the Middle East subject matter dissuade you. There is no proselytizing here, only views from a humanitarian who believes firmly in the power of education.
Daily we are inundated with news, twisted and then funneled through a narrow prism, about the “war on terror" and the misrepresented people of Central Asia. Watching the evening news is like watching the light of a laser beam shine on one aspect of the conflict in the Middle East. Once you read the first several chapters of Three Cups of Tea, that laser morphs into a flashlight and toward the end of the novel, the flashlight becomes a flood light, shining new revelations about a sorely misunderstood part of the world.
"Greg Mortenson is fighting a personal war on terror that has an impact on all of us, and his weapon is not guns or bombs, but schools. What could be a better story than that?" {Parade editor-in-chief Lee Kravitz}
Read this book and discover the enormous change that can be made by the sweat of a subtle man, who dared to have a vision, and then nurture that vision into fruition a hundred times over and you will know firmly that education is the key to peace in the Middle East.
It seems like there are small pockets of radicalized people all over the globe who want the world to return to the Middle Ages -- we've got some right here in the US as well! Educated people know better.
ReplyDeleteI wish more of us were reading popular (non-suspense/war) novels by and about the Middle East -- like this one or writers like Naguib Mahfouz. We need to come to understand one another on the human level if we want peace and cooperation.
Thanks for this post, Maya