Traverse
City READS, a “One Book, One Community” literacy initiative, announced
it’s selection of Three Cups of
Tea: One
Man's Mission to Promote Peace...One School at a Time
by Greg
Mortenson and David Oliver Relin as
the focus for Northern Michigan’s seventh annual community book club.
TC
READS has designated April through October as reading months.
This year’s event will culminate with a visit from the author
Greg Mortenson on Sunday, September 21, 2008.
The
program’s schedule allows area schools to incorporate the book into
their fall planning, as well as engages summer visitors looking for the
perfect beach read. Junior
and high school teachers and local church groups plan to add Three
Cups of Tea to their curriculums in an effort to further encourage
family involvement in reading.
In
Three Cups of Tea, Mortenson,
and acclaimed journalist Relin, recount the unlikely journey that led
Mortenson from a failed attempt to climb Pakistan’s K2, the world’s
second highest mountain, in 1993, to successfully building schools in some
of the most remote regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Lost
and sick on his descent from K2, Mortenson wandered into a remote,
impoverished Pakistan village that nursed him back to health.
While recovering he observed the village’s children sitting
outdoors and writing their lessons with sticks in the dirt.
The village was so poor, they could not afford to pay a teacher $1
per day. On leaving the
village, Mortenson promised to return and build a school for the village.
Mortenson’s promise in 1993 has turned into one of the most incredible humanitarian campaign’s of our time: Greg Mortenson’s one-man mission to counteract extremism and terrorism by building schools—especially for girls—throughout the breeding ground of the Taliban.
Three
Cups of Tea
chronicles Mortenson’s journey from mountaineer to fundraiser to school
builder to founder of the Central Asia Institute, who’s mission is to
promote and provide community-based education and literacy programs,
especially for girls, in remote mountain regions of Central Asia.
Greg Mortenson, is the director of the Central Asia Institute. A resident of Montana, he spends several months each year in Pakistan and Afghanistan. David Oliver Relin is a contributing editor for Parade Magazine and Skiing Magazine. He has won more than forty national awards for his work as a writer and editor.
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Reads celebrates the joys of reading and the common threads that unite us
as a community by encouraging everyone to read and discuss one book.
Traverse
City READS is co-sponsored by Friends of the Traverse Area District
Library and ForeWord Magazine.
For details on how to become a sponsor, please
click here or contact Richard
Schneider at 231-933-3669.