Sometimes you are captivated by a book because it is written in a superior literary style, and sometimes because it is just a great story.  When that story happens to be true, about a homegrown American hero, it is doubly riveting.

"Three Cups of Tea," written by journalist David Oliver Relin and mountain climber Greg Mortenson, is the true story of how Mortenson took his youthful passion for climbing and morphed it into a passion for educating.  In particular, the children of the inspiring mountain denizens of Pakistan who have long acted as porters and guides to climbers from all over the world.

Mortenson is an unlikely hero.  In his late 30s, after a failed attempt at climbing K-2 (one of the fiercest of all climbs in the Himalayas) he got separated from his climbing group, and then from his guide.  He wandered, spent and disoriented, into the small village of Korphe.  That unexpected detour changed his life.  It was 1993.  What happened in the decade since is the focus of "Three Cups of Tea."

Born in Minnesota in 1958, Mortenson was whisked off to Tanzania by his missionary parents at the age of three months and grew up in the shadow of Mt. Kilimanjaro.  As a schoolboy, he scaled the peak for the first time and fell in love with mountain climbing.  When he was a teenager, the family returned to America where he finished his secondary education in Minnesota.  During the Cold War, he served as a medic in the U.S. Army in Germany, where he received the Army Commendation Medal..

Given his early upbringing, it is probably not surprising that Mortenson was comfortable in the hinterlands of Pakistan and that he mastered enough of its language to communicate with the people of Korphe when he stumbled into their village.  The people cared for him and sent a runner to locate his guide.

But before he left Korphe, Mortenson toured the small village and discovered that the children attended school on an open, windswept plateau.  They had no building in which to gather.  Mortenson promised the headman of the town that he would return one day and build a school in Korphe.

It was an odd promise for a 35-year-old vagabond who had no money, no property and, at the time, no job.  But Mortenson is the rare dreamer who sees no boundaries, only the finished product of his dreams.

"Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace... One School at a Time" is the story of how Mortenson, through some deep connection to that spiritual river of truth, was able to move mountains.
 

To learn more about Greg Mortenson's life, book and mission, click on Three Cups of Tea.