Reading Project 2009-2010
"The Reading Project consists of a series of events to encourage reading and stimulate debate among members of ISU and our community. For the Fall 2009 Reading Project, the committee has selected Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson."
Greg Mortenson has provided a Three Cups of Tea Reading Guide and a Question & Answer Interview for use in book clubs, interviews, classrooms, etc.
-Bonnie Frantz, Chair
Goals
Encourage students, faculty, and staff to:
- gain a common intellectual experience
- participate in November 2009 events
- lectures
- essay contest
- panel discussions
- author keynote (possibility)
- engage in cross-disciplinary thinking, dialogue, and debate
From the Author's Website
In Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace... One School at a Time, Greg Mortenson, and journalist David Oliver Relin, recount the journey that led Mortenson from a failed 1993 attempt to climb Pakistan's K2, the world's second highest mountain, to successfully establish schools in some of the most remote regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan. By replacing guns with pencils, rhetoric with reading, Mortenson combines his unique background with his intimate knowledge of the third-world to promote peace with books, not bombs, and successfully bring education and hope to remote communities in central Asia. Three Cups of Tea is at once an unforgettable adventure and the inspiring true story of how one man really is changing the world-one school at a time.
"Three Cups of Tea is one of the most remarkable adventure stories of our time. Greg Mortenson's dangerous and difficult quest to build schools in the wildest parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan is not only a thrilling read, it's proof that one ordinary person, with the right combination of character and determination, really can change the world."
-Tom Brokaw
"Three Cups of Tea is beautifully written. It is also a critically important book at this time in history. The governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan are both failing their students on a massive scale. The work Mortenson is doing, providing the poorest students with a balanced education, is making them much more difficult for the extremist madrassas to recruit."
-Ahmed Rashid, best-selling author of Taliban: Militant Islam and Oil in Central Asia and Descent Into Chaos.
"A Template For Peace" -Bloomsbury Review