Greg Mortenson

Greg Mortenson grew up in Tanzania as the son of Lutheran missionaries, an upbringing that exposed him from a young age to languages, religions, and customs very different from those of the United States. After returning to America he pursued a career in nursing, motivated in part by his desire to help his sister Christa, who suffered from severe epilepsy and died young. Alongside his medical training he became a passionate mountaineer, and it was through climbing that he first found his way to Pakistan and to the village that would change his life. He went on to co-found the Central Asia Institute, oversee the construction of dozens of schools across northern Pakistan and Afghanistan, and write a follow-up volume titled Stones Into Schools. He stepped down from leadership of the CAI in the wake of financial and journalistic controversies but the organization itself has continued operating under reformed governance.

David Oliver Relin was an experienced international journalist whose work appeared in Parade magazine and other outlets. He spent considerable time interviewing Mortenson and the people connected to his projects in order to assemble Three Cups of Tea, which is written as a third-person biography rather than as a first-person memoir. Relin's reporting brought texture and pacing to the narrative that helped the book reach a far wider audience than most accounts of nonprofit work in central Asia ever achieve. Relin died in November 2012, leaving behind a body of work focused on global humanitarian issues and on the lives of people whose stories rarely reach mainstream Western readers.