Three cups of tea, paperback/greg mortenson

Here we drink three cups of tea to do business; the first you are a stranger, the second you become a friend, and the third, you join our family, and for our family we are prepared to do anything - even die - Haji Ali, Korphe Village Chief, Karakoram mountains, Pakistan.

In 1993, after a terrifying and disastrous attempt to climb K2, a mountaineer called Greg Mortenson drifted, cold and dehydrated, into an impoverished Pakistan village in the Karakoram Mountains.

Moved by the inhabitants kindness, he promised to return and build a school.

Three Cups of Tea is the story of that promise and its extraordinary outcome.

Over the next decade Mortenson built not just one but fifty-five schools - especially for girls - in remote villages across the forbidding and breathtaking landscape of Pakistan and Afghanistan, just as the Taliban rose to power.

His story is at once a riveting adventure and a testament to the power of the humanitarian spirit.