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| Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations . . . One School at a Time | 
 enlarge | Manufacturer: Viking
Category: EBooks
List Price: $15.00
Buy New: $8.51
You Save: $6.49 (43%)
Avg. Customer Rating:  1464 reviews
Sales Rank: 27
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 352
Dewey Decimal Number: 371.82209549
ASIN: B000OT8GTO
Publication Date: March 22, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| Customer Reviews:
 One Cup To Go, Please April 29, 2007
103 out of 189 found this review helpful
I have two problems with this book. Reading it makes me feel like I'm stuck in the seat behind someone very tall in the movie theater. I have trouble, first, getting past the writer and his perceptions of Greg and second, getting to know Greg himself. Like a speaker introducing the guest - I just want to hear Greg tell the story but he only speaks every once in awhile. Like most male authors, the motivations, feelings, emotions etc. are ignored. For example, there's no reaction of Greg's after he gets a garbage can dumped on his head in high school? Wouldn't this have been a good time to have Greg say he missed Africa and vowed to go back someday or something? It feels like there are two people in this book you are asked to get involved with and there should only be one: Greg.
Admire the Commitment and Accomplishments, but... October 15, 2007
95 out of 156 found this review helpful
What Mortensen accomplished with commitment and perseverance is undoubtly a great humanitarin effort. However, the book is irritating to read. Mortensen's name is used so many times over and over it is distracting. "Mortensen this" and "Mortensen that"! It reads like Mortiensen is a demi-god and it really presents like this when you realize he is a coauthor. Why not write this inspiring story in "first person"?
The humanitarian effort is inspiring if you can get through the book!
T for Tedious September 19, 2007
89 out of 168 found this review helpful
This book is a hagiography of an admittedly saint-like fellow, Greg Mortensen, who -- like most saints -- is a pain in the butt. He is tenacious and uncompromising, clever, curious (learning a great deal about the peoples and languages in Pakistan and Afghanistan), dedicated, and has no sense of humor or irony. A mountain climber who sleeps in his car and works part-time, Mortensen -- after getting lost in the Himalayas -- vows to return to the Pakistani villagers who saved his life and build them a school. Doing this all by himself, as opposed to, for example, working thru UNICEF or Habitat for Humanity, Mortensen runs into predictable snafus. His biographer never met an adjective he didn't like, and gives backstory on every character who wanders across the screen. I finally started reading only the first sentence of each paragraph, and found the book much more coherent that way. It's a long shapeless story.
What an incredible story... April 11, 2006
63 out of 68 found this review helpful
My goodness. I just finished the book, and I am in tears. I am a world traveller (32 countries in just about every region on the globe), and consider myself compassionate to a fault; but even I, after September 11th, possessed a fair degree of anger at Muslims. I had spent some time in the Middle East and North Africa, and although I tried to respect the traditions as much as possible (covering my arms, wore long skirts, not looking at men in the eye), I was still assaulted in broad daylight in a street bazaar in Cairo, Egypt, surrounded by at least a dozen of my classmates (an old man came up and grabbed my [...]). The anger that started then had totally blown up after September 11th and consumed me, the point where I had actually said that I will never believe Islam is a religion of peace, especially after the reaction to the Mohammed cartoons.
Well.
I was wrong.
This book has reminded me why I loved the regions in the Himalayas and beyond; the simplicity of life, the fierceness and protectiveness towards family and friends; and their incredible desire to do the best for themselves with whatever they have on hand, even if it means going to school on a bare field covered with morning frost. Greg and David describe these people in Baltistan and beyond so well that you cannot help admiring or even falling in love with these proud, strong people.
I've always told people if you encourage positive change for just one person, you'll change the whole world for them. Greg and his CAI cohorts have done that for literally hundreds of thousands of children. It was so gratifying for me to read, despite the selfishness of our people today, that there are still some who passionately believe in changing the world for others.
For me, it was the speech by Syed Abbas (on page 257, hardcover) that broke the last of my hard-core attitude towards Muslims and Islam.
I am off to make my contribution - meager but still a contribution - to CAI so they can continue their incredible work.
Worst writing I've read in a long time October 20, 2006
63 out of 159 found this review helpful
You decide for yourself what you think about Mortenson. I think the subtitle of the book should be "How One Man Became a Dhimmi."
What I will say is that the writing of the co-writer is nauseating. It is the most frantically hysterical hagiography you'll ever see. "The crystalline daggers of the mountain ranges scratched their way like deranged fingernails into the howling wind of the overarching midnight blue ocean of the sky--the same sky that hung over the head of the ancient, proud, morally superior, but so horribly vulnerable people that Mortenson had left the despicable excesses of the United States and crossed the earth pennilessly to save before it was too late."
I made that sentence up but it is better than a lot of the sentences in the book. Read at your own peril.
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