The pages of July

It's hard to put down

I read about this book and its influence on the American military on the front page of the NY Times Sunday. For some reason, I usually avoid books on the Mideast, but it caught my attention, and my wife Susan already had a copy.

I picked it up, and it's hard to put down.

This is the way to win wars, and it gives you a great perspective on Islamic culture and life: build schools.

Not only is it a great story of an individual American's success--a mountain climber from Montana-- in helping poor people in the remote Himalaya of northern Pakistan, it is also masterfully written, a narrative that keeps you turning the pages.

And the journalist who helped write it  has a beautiful command of the language.  Some of my underlined excerpts:

• "So Mortenson lay beneath the stars salting the sky... ."
• ...helping to guide him past the roadblocks of life in northern Pakistan... ."
• "Jet lag. Culture shock. Whatever name you gave the demons of dislocation... ."
• "...a coffee-colored stuffed monkey that had been his closest companion back where memory fringes into mere sensory recall."
• "...language was a currency he was loath to spend carelessly."
• "...swimming happily in a sea of cultures and languages."
• "Greg Mortenson's learning curve with climbing was as steep as the rock faces he was soon scaling."
• "He had stitched together half of the globe, on a fifty-six-hour itinerary...and, finally, out of this tunnel of time zones and airports... ."
• "He was tucked into a concrete hive of shops... ."