Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin was too well written for it's genre. It's a biography of a man who set up schools in the areas he climbed mountains in. I like to read biographies at a fast pace for the purpose of seeing learning or having something revealed from the life they lived. In this case, the author used so many phenomenal descriptions of the land a places that I had to linger over sentence after sentence. And linger I did . . . for about 150 pages and then I stopped. Altogether stopped. I'm over it.
" . . . one of the greatest climbers of his day, and perhpas his era's most discerning connoisseur of precipitous landscapes . . ."
"Had he been so happy to simply be alive after K2 that his exuberance had colored this place beyond reason?"
"We Americans think you have to accomplish everything quickly. We're the country of thirty-minute power lunches and two-minute football drills. Our leaders thought their 'shock and awe' campaign could end the war in Iraq before it even started. Haji Ali taught me to share three cups of tea, to slow down and make building relationships as important as building projects. He taught me that I had more to learn from the people I work with than I cold ever hope to teach them."
And the book I did finish was The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. I liked the historical and cultural power of this book but found myself uncomfortable both because of graphic scenes and the condition of women. I feel so passionately about women and their right to chose the roles they want that the powerless women in this book was, while not shocking, haunting.
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