Sunday’s NY Times Book Review featured The Dark Side, a new book by Jane Mayer that delves into the Bush Administration’s widespread use of torture as a central tool in the battle against terrorism. Reviewer Adam Brinkley calls The Dark Side “powerful, brilliantly researched and deeply unsettling.”

I lingered over Brinkley’s review this weekend, struck by the stark contrast between Mayer’s important new book and Three Cups of Tea, the book I had just finished reading two days earlier.

Three Cups of Tea roams some of the same treacherous terrain, though from a vastly different perspective. It’s the story of Greg Mortenson, a former Berkeley E.R. nurse and mountaineer who found himself lost and dazed in an impoverished Pakistan village after braving the K2 summit, the world’s second tallest peak. Touched by the kindness of helpful strangers, Mortenson vowed to return and build a school in the remote village. Three Cups of Tea chronices what happens when the penniless Mortenson endeavers to keep his promise and ends up waging a one-man war against terrorism — by building one school after another in Pakistan. Amazingly, the American continues his (often harrowing) journeys through the region before and after the 9/11 attacks and expands his mission by building schools for girls in Afghanistan.

Three Cups of Tea isn’t a new book. It was published in 2006 and has become a favorite of book groups and libraries (The San Diego Public Library, for example, adopted Three Cups of Tea as its One City, One Book selection in 2008.) I was transfixed by it shortly after my friend Lori Sakamoto handed me her copy in July, a few day before she boarded a plane for her own summertime rescue mission to Kenya.

The inspiring Three Cups of Tea is an extraordinary window into a part of the world badly misunderstood by most Americans — especially a certain American residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for the moment. The book offers important lessons for leaders who think that waterboarding is the route to anything besides creating new enemies.