Book Review: Three Cups of Tea

I don’t read non-fiction.  Like contracts and warrantees and instruction manuals.  Like informational books.  Reading this stuff gives me anxiety.  Like the summer I read Protein Power (Eades), the 678 page GoLive manual and the Zone, all in a couple of weeks?  Freak out city.  Add in the fact that I couldn’t eat sugar.  The lost summer.

Then Jen picked a “real” book for book club.  Three Cups of Tea.  A book about English manners?  Naw.  Jen’s an Aussie.  But I’m  cooperative (sometimes), so I bought the book and I waded into it.  I don’t want to tell you what it’s about.  G always asks me what things are about – and I always get in trouble afterwards, because the book always turns out to be different than he thought it was going to be, based on what I told him.  And anyway, I think that three quarters of the wonder of a book comes in its unfolding.  I don’t read blurbs or back cover bits, either.

I will tell you that I was not encouraged in the beginning.  You remember Moby Dick?  All that detail about whaling?  (What – you never read Moby Dick???) Yeah.  There’s a lot of stuff about climbing in here – climbing really, really tall and treacherous famous mountains.  Just between you and me, my own feeling about stuff like climbing treacherous famous mountains and doing expeditions to the North Pole?  Stupid.  A stupid risk.  When you could be putting all that courage and determination into curing Swine Flu or dementia – or better still, actually raising your kids.

But by the end of the book, I was really blown away.  This is not a political book, although the principals in the book have strong views of things.  They are the views of the people on the ground, different than views of people who are always watching parts of the planet through satellite surveillance. Both perspectives are important.  But the ground one gets less press.

The book reads like fiction – a narrative mostly, I suspect, semi-dictated.  The detail is delicious.  The characters wonderful.  But they are not characters – they are real people.  People, some of them, who are still breathing on this planet.

And the hero?  Just a person.  A regular guy, but not really.  Not really.  In his story, we have daring-do, but mostly we have the stubborn almost bovine practice of walking forward, just one foot at a time, to get from one place to another.  And on the way, miraculous, costly, risky things begin to grow.

I will tell you that reading this book will change your world view – not in the way that some wishy-washy Sam’s club fake religious feel-good thing is supposed to do.  This book will take you by the heart and shake you, but entertaining you the whole time.  How’s that?  Eating what’s good for you, when it tastes just like dessert.

Well written.  Beautifully paced.  You’d almost suspect the whole thing was made up, the way the timing is handled.  There are saints and villains here, but you have to be careful and keep your eyes truly open to know when to think either word.  This book is about triumph, in part – slogging, persistent, faithful triumph.  But more, it is about the work that still needs to be done—the size of the planet we live on, but the commonality of its human heart.

A beautiful read.  A good read.

NEW:  I want to add this:  in the middle of A Christmas Carol, the ghost of Christmas Present presents two wolfish, nightmarish children – he names them Want and Ignorance and says to be wary of them both.  (This doesn’t show up in the movies – I guess screenwriters find the scene irrelevant????)   But of the two, we are warned to be most worried about Ignorance.

It’s ignorance that makes normal Christian Westerners hate and fear Islam, and it is ignorance that shapes the Middle Eastern hate of the United States.  The amazing thing is that there is not half as much hate there for us as we think.  There are many who are willing to consider us as fellow human beings.  It’s ignorance that allows young hot-headed people to twist religions of peace and love into weapons of domination.  Extremists are called extremists because they are the fringe, the ragged edges to a much larger and far more moderate and cohesive whole.

I found my friend, Luba, through a man who believes that if one normal person on one side of the globe has a chance to meet one normal person on the opposite side of the globe, the two will begin to see clearly that they are both human – and both probably worth taking the time to get to know.

This is what made the book so profoundly valuable to me. 

Highly recommended.