Greg Mortenson and Susan Roth, illustrated by Susan Roth,
Listen to the Wind: The Story of Dr. Greg and Three Cups of Tea
Dial, 2009.

Ages 6-12

Any parent who has read Greg Mortenson’s bestselling Three Cups of Tea has been looking for a way to share this inspiring book with young readers.  Now we have it.

The story behind both Three Cups of Tea and Listen to the Wind is the same true tale: Greg Mortenson, a nurse and mountain climber, attempted to summit K2 and got lost coming down.  Disoriented and nearly starving, he stumbled into the small village of Korphe in northern Pakistan, where kind strangers brought him back to health and showed him the way home.  In gratitude, Mortenson returned to Pakistan and built the children of Korphe a school. 

The grown-up version of the tale is a harrowing account of Mortenson’s journey, from fundraising to fatwahs, from kids to kidnappings… but the essence of Three Cups of Tea is retold in this children’s book: a beautiful and simple story about a selfless act done in gratitude for another selfless act. 

In Listen to the Wind, the story is wisely told from the point of view of the children of Korphe, to whom Mortenson was at first a mystery and later a hero. But Mortenson doesn’t take all the credit for the building of the school. The children of Korphe are grateful, but also clearly proud of what they have accomplished together with their “Dr Greg,” using stones from their own mountains to help build the school with their own small hands. As Three Cups of Tea shows adults what one energetic person with and open mind can do for international relations, Listen to the Wind shows children that they too have the power to do good.

Susan Roth’s intricately constructed collage-illustrations bring alive the cold immensity of the mountains, the warm charm of the Korphe children, and the cheerfulness of the apricot orchards.  There is also a lovely synchronicity at work here that binds the story to the collage medium.  As Roth explains in the book’s afterword, the women in Korphe routinely use bits of things that foreign climbers leave behind to make all sorts of things, and Roth has done the same, gathering scraps of paper and cloth to make something extraordinarily beautiful.

Like its grown-up counterpart, this book absolutely deserves to be a bestseller. 

Jeannine Cuevas
November, 2008