Three Cups of Tea
Greg Mortenson, 2006
Memoir & biography Travel & nature
A failed climb leads a young American to promise a Pakistani village a school — and to a decades-long argument that education is the real front line. A plain, hopeful account of a failed climb turning into school-building, with a current of unease beneath the promises.
Feels like hope and unease. About power.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy memoirs about travel, education and one person's stubborn commitment to a village. Be aware that it was co-written with a journalist and draws on villagers' accounts, so some scenes can read as reconstructed rather than immediate.
Why read it
It shows how a single promise can grow into a long argument for girls' education, and why that argument still matters.
A page from the book
Why educating a girl changes more than her own life.
Once you educate the boys, they tend to leave the villages and go search for work in the cities, but the girls stay home, become leaders in the community, and pass on what they’ve learned. If you really want to change a culture, to empower women, improve basic hygiene and health care, and fight high rates of infant mortality, the answer is to educate girls. Greg Mortenson.The book was co-written with journalist David Oliver Relin, who travelled to Pakistan and Afghanistan to gather villagers' accounts.
Books that feel like this
Where to get it
Some of these links earn us a small commission, at no cost to you. It keeps BookFeed free.
Questions readers ask
- Is Three Cups of Tea for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy memoirs about travel, education and one person's stubborn commitment to a village. Be aware that it was co-written with a journalist and draws on villagers' accounts, so some scenes can read as reconstructed rather than immediate.
- What is Three Cups of Tea like?
- A plain, hopeful account of a failed climb turning into school-building, with a current of unease beneath the promises. Feels like hope and unease. About power.
- What should I read after Three Cups of Tea?
- If you liked Three Cups of Tea, try I Am Malala (Malala Yousafzai), A Promised Land (Barack Obama) and Memoirs of a Revolutionist (Peter Kropotkin).
A taste of the feed
The kind of power that never gets called power.
Our men think earning money and ordering around others is where power lies. They don’t think power is in the hands of the woman who takes care of everyone all day long, and gives birth to their children.
I Am Malala · Malala Yousafzai
The cost, in someone else's bread, of a life of the mind.
But what right had I to these highest joys, when all around me was nothing but misery and struggle for a mouldy bit of bread; when whatsoever I should spend to enable me to live in that world of higher emotions must needs be taken from the very mouths of those who grew the wheat and had not bread enough for their children? From somebody’s mouth it must be taken, because the aggregate production of mankind remains still so low.
Memoirs of a Revolutionist · Peter Kropotkin
What an apology can build after it has arrived too late.
You were my child. I should have protected you. I lived a lifetime in the moment I read those lines, a life that was not the one I had actually lived. I became a different person, who remembered a different childhood. I didn’t understand the magic of those words then, and I don’t understand it now. I know only this: that when my mother told me she had not been the mother to me that she wished she’d been, she became that mother for the first time.
Educated · Tara Westover
Read pages from books like this, one at a time
Keep reading in the feed