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TIME MAGAZINE – Asia Edition

Saturday, Dec. 16, 2006

Best Asian Books of 2006

Looking for holiday diversions? Our writers bring you this highly eclectic selection of their favorite Asian books of the past year—from a French Buddhist monk's insights into happiness to the finest studies of contemporary China to a 900-page novel about cops and gangsters in Bombay.

9. Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations ... One School at a Time
Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin

Lost and delirious after a failed 1993 attempt on the world's second tallest peak, K2, the American mountaineer Greg Mortenson was rescued by residents of Korphe, a remote village high in the Pakistani Himalayas. Grateful for their assistance, Mortenson vowed to build the villagers a school. He returned home to San Francisco, sold everything he owned (including his precious climbing gear), and then embarked on the most arduous quest of his career.

Three Cups of Tea, co-written by journalist David Oliver Relin, is the account of Mortenson's extraordinary effort to give a school to Korphe and many other villages in the Taliban heartland.

After 13 years in which he has brought 58 schools to Pakistan and Afghanistan, Mortenson remains convinced that terrorism should be fought with books, not bombs. "[Terrorism] happens because children aren't being offered a bright enough future," Mortenson told a gathering of U.S. Congress members not long after 9/11. Though awkwardly written in parts, Three Cups of Tea is an astonishing tale of compassion—and of a promise kept.
—By Aryn Baker

http://www.time.com/time/asia/magazine/article/0,13673,501061225-1570746,00.html