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A review by leavingsealevel
Stones Into Schools: Promoting Peace With Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan by Greg Mortenson
3.0
My book club read this (my in-person, NV book club that is...I have been ignoring my virtual/Seattle book-club, very sorry!)! I <3 my book club and I am seriously tempted to write about how awesome they are instead of collecting my thoughts on this book. But I probably should stay on point...
I read [b:Three Cups of Tea|49436|Three Cups of Tea One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time|Greg Mortenson|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1170358990s/49436.jpg|251800] a couple of years ago and honestly I didn't expect to like it. I did like it though--I liked it a lot--so bear with me as I explain what I was expecting it to be like. There are a lot of books out there about privileged U.S. kids (ok, twenty/thirty-somethings) "saving" people, "saving the world," etc. I am so SICK of being preached at by privileged folks who think that they are entitled to tell people of the Global South how to solve their problems by virtue of some combination of their education and their wealth and their gender and their whiteness. I am ESPECIALLY sick of that narrative when the authors/speakers can't even bring themselves to recognize that their own privilege exists as a flip side of the "problems" (structural injustice would be a better word) they want to solve. I'm not saying I have the answers as to how to be a solidarity activist and not do these things: I'm just saying I want to do whatever work I end up doing in a fundamentally different way. One way to figure out how to do that is to study those privileged activists who do manage to follow different paths (obviously, another and I think more important way is by listening to non-privileged, Third World voices for justice that are often silenced). See where I'm going with this? I dismissed Mortenson as the former sort of do-gooder before I even started the book, and it turned out that he struck me as more of the latter (up for debate, of course).
I learned from reading about Mortenson's work helping communities build schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan because he seems to have the ability to genuinely listen to and work with the people he wants to help. He reminds me of Paul Farmer in this regard (read [b:Mountains Beyond Mountains|10235|Mountains Beyond Mountains The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World|Tracy Kidder|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1166152608s/10235.jpg|1639628] which is about Farmer's work with Partners in Health in Haiti if you haven't already...I'm working on reading some of Farmer's own stuff now).
I read [b:Three Cups of Tea|49436|Three Cups of Tea One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time|Greg Mortenson|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1170358990s/49436.jpg|251800] a couple of years ago and honestly I didn't expect to like it. I did like it though--I liked it a lot--so bear with me as I explain what I was expecting it to be like. There are a lot of books out there about privileged U.S. kids (ok, twenty/thirty-somethings) "saving" people, "saving the world," etc. I am so SICK of being preached at by privileged folks who think that they are entitled to tell people of the Global South how to solve their problems by virtue of some combination of their education and their wealth and their gender and their whiteness. I am ESPECIALLY sick of that narrative when the authors/speakers can't even bring themselves to recognize that their own privilege exists as a flip side of the "problems" (structural injustice would be a better word) they want to solve. I'm not saying I have the answers as to how to be a solidarity activist and not do these things: I'm just saying I want to do whatever work I end up doing in a fundamentally different way. One way to figure out how to do that is to study those privileged activists who do manage to follow different paths (obviously, another and I think more important way is by listening to non-privileged, Third World voices for justice that are often silenced). See where I'm going with this? I dismissed Mortenson as the former sort of do-gooder before I even started the book, and it turned out that he struck me as more of the latter (up for debate, of course).
I learned from reading about Mortenson's work helping communities build schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan because he seems to have the ability to genuinely listen to and work with the people he wants to help. He reminds me of Paul Farmer in this regard (read [b:Mountains Beyond Mountains|10235|Mountains Beyond Mountains The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World|Tracy Kidder|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1166152608s/10235.jpg|1639628] which is about Farmer's work with Partners in Health in Haiti if you haven't already...I'm working on reading some of Farmer's own stuff now).