Contact: Harriet Laird
STARKVILLE, Miss.--Building on the success of last year's Maroon Edition First-Year Reading Experience, Mississippi State President Mark E. Keenum is announcing a second campus-wide reading program and book selection for the 2010 freshman class.
"Three Cups of Tea," a New York Times No. 1 bestseller, tells the true story of a man's life-threatening attempt to climb Pakistan's K2, the world's second-highest mountain. Greg Mortenson, the book's co-author, is nursed back to health by people in a local village, where he promises to return one day to help counteract terrorism through education.
"It is an incredible humanitarian campaign to build schools in the most anti-American parts of Asia," Keenum said. "The story also uses a cup of tea as a metaphor to describe how one goes from being a stranger to being a member of a family.
"We feel this definitely is something freshman students can relate to as they begin their journey of being a part of our Bulldog family," the MSU alumnus added.
Maroon Edition was initiated to engage all MSU freshmen--and any others interested on campus--in reading the same book during the summer and fall. The ongoing project is intended to serve as a basis for intellectual and cultural discussions as the new students begin interacting with others at every level of the land-grant institution founded 132 years ago on Feb. 28.
Linda Morse, selection committee chair, said three book choices were recommended to the MSU chief executive by a team of more than 30 faculty, administrators, staff, and students. This year, Keenum selected a work of non-fiction, she added.
Morse, a professor of counseling and educational psychology, said the inaugural Maroon Edition selection was "A Painted House" by international best-selling author John Grisham, also an MSU alumnus.
"The reading of 'Painted House' was combined with a service-learning Habitat for Humanity project," Morse said. "By the conclusion of late 2009, MSU students and employees had clocked approximately 2,000 combined hours of volunteer work in helping build a new home for a Starkville family."
"Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time" (Penguin Books, 2007) is widely available, including at the Barnes & Noble at Mississippi State Bookstore. Writer and editor Oliver Relin co-authored the book with Mortenson, a former army medic who is co-founder and executive director of the nonprofit Bozeman, Mont.-based Central Asia Institute.
NEWS EDITORS/DIRECTORS: For additional information, contact Dr. Morse at 662-325-7105 or lmorse@colled.msstate.edu.
For more information about Mississippi State University, see http://www.msstate.edu/.