In 1993 Greg Mortenson was the exhausted survivor of a failed attempt to
ascend K2, an American climbing bum wandering emaciated and lost through
Pakistan’s Karakoram Himalaya. After he was taken in and nursed back to
health by the people of an impoverished Pakistani village, Mortenson
promised to return one day and build them a school. From that rash, earnest
promise grew one of the most incredible humanitarian campaigns of our
time—Greg Mortenson’s one-man mission to counteract extremism by building
schools, especially for girls, throughout the breeding ground of the
Taliban.