Book of the Month: Stones into Schools, by Greg Mortenson

The sense of place that resonates through Greg Mortenson’s astonishing new book, Stones into Schools, is a multi-layered creation: The landscapes of Afghanistan and Pakistan are there, with their mud-walled villages, terraced fields of wheat, potatoes and millet, apple and apricot orchards, poplar-lined canals, and snow-mantled peaks. And beneath that, depicted in exquisite and sometimes excruciating detail, is what we might call the psychic territory of the place.

In account after account of meetings with tribal elders and leaders, feisty local teachers and administrators, and impassioned everyday citizens from taxi drivers to horseback riders, Mortenson piercingly portrays the landscape of courtesies, traditions, impoverishments, expectations, bonds, fears, and dreams that is 21st-century Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Following up on his phenomenally best-selling Three Cups of Tea, Mortenson weaves threads of that earlier book into an artful narrative that focuses on the triumphs and setbacks in his subsequent efforts to build schools, especially girls' schools, in rural Afghanistan and regions of Pakistan that were devastated by an earthquake in October 2005. The complex social structures in urban Afghanistan are revealed as well when Mortenson's associate Sarfraz Khan initiates a women's vocational center in Kabul—an innovation that within a few years leads to the formation of 17 such centers in the capital alone, and numerous satellite centers in other urban areas.

Stones into Schools reminds us that every day in these fractured countries, people carry on their lives under unimaginably difficult circumstances with dignity, warmth, grace, faith, and hope. Given the indomitable will of these people to build schools for their children and the dramatic effects these efforts are already reaping, it seems self-evident that this movement is a sane and sustainable way to counter the Taliban and all regional extremists. Not so evident but equally critical is the fact that these efforts require an extraordinarily detailed and attuned appreciation of the nuances of life and landscape in these regions—the kind of appreciation that empowers every page of Mortenson's humble and inspiring account.