ETUDE: New Voices In Literary Nonfiction

ETUDE: New Voices In Literary Nonfiction

School of Journalism – University of Oregon

Winter 2007

Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin

Reviewed by LiDoña Wagner

“I wrote the story. But Greg Mortenson lived it.” David Relin tells us in the introduction to Three Cups of Tea. Right off the bat, he informs the reader that Mortenson is a flawed being whose fluid sense of time nearly drove Relin to abandon writing the book. But he also admits to being won over by what Mortenson has accomplished in Pakistan.

After his brief introduction to Three Cups of Tea, Relin disappears. Unlike author Tracy Kidder in Mountains Beyond Mountains, Relin found a way to tell Mortenson’s story without himself becoming a character in it. The award-winning journalist moves the narrative seamlessly back and forth between Pakistan and the United States in just the way that Mortenson’s life and sense of time dictate. He does a masterful job of entwining Mortenson’s story with the unrest in Central Asia, the rise of the Taliban, 9/11 as experienced by Mortenson in Pakistan, and the American offensive in Afghanistan.

Relin weaves in Mortenson’s back-story – he spent his first fourteen years in East Africa and later trained to be a nurse and a mountain climber – but the narrative arc follows the decade-long journey by which Mortenson turned his failure to reach the summit of K2 in the Karakoram range of the Himalayas into a commitment to building schools, especially for girls.

Of the many people other than Mortenson involved in building rural schools, Relin elevates only one to the level of another full-blooded character; Mortenson’s mentor Haji Ali. Haji Ali is nurmadhar of the Muslim village into which Mortenson stumbled after he lost his way descending K2. Time after time, the illiterate Haji Ali transmits wisdom to his protégé. Wisdom that, unlike Carlos Castenada’s mentor, does not take Mortenson on wild shamanic journeys, but instead keeps him grounded in the realities of Pakistani life, such as the ritual of drinking tea. Christened Dr. Greg by those whom he blesses with his medical knowledge, Mortenson journeyed from stranger to guest and, finally, to a family member whom others will defend to the point of death.

http://etude.uoregon.edu/winter2007/books/tea.html

Literary Nonfiction Program, School of Journalism, University of Oregon