Greg Mortenson

Greg Mortenson is co-author of The New York Times bestseller, Three Cups of Tea. The book has sold over 3.6 million copies, is published in 41 countries, and has been a New York Times bestseller for over three years since its 2007 release.

As of 2010, Mortenson has established over 131 schools in rural and often volatile regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan, which provide education to over 58,000 children, including 48,000 girls, where few educational opportunities before existed. Mortenson was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in both 2009 and 2010.

Mortenson was born in 1957 and grew up in Tanzania. His father founded Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre, and his mother founded the International School, Moshi.

In July 1992, Mortenson’s sister Christa died from a massive seizure after a lifelong struggle with epilepsy. To honor his sister’s memory, in 1993 Mortenson climbed Pakistan’s K2, the world’s second-highest mountain, located in the Karakoram range. While recovering from the climb, Mortenson met a group of children sitting in the dirt writing with sticks in the sand, and made a promise to help them build a school. From that rash promise grew a humanitarian campaign in which Mortenson has dedicated his life to promote education, especially for girls, in remote regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan. 

His work has not been without difficulty. In 1996, he survived an eight-day armed kidnapping by the Taliban in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province tribal areas, and in 2003 escaped a firefight with feuding Afghan warlords.

When not overseas for half of the year, Mortenson, 52, lives in Montana with his wife, Dr. Tara Bishop, a clinical psychologist, and their two young children. Mortenson’s new book, Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Books Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, was released by Viking in December 2009 and debuted at #2 on The New York Times bestseller list. Mortenson is the co-founder of the Central Asia Institute (www.ikat.org) and founder of Pennies for Peace (www.penniesforpeace.org).

George F. Will

George F. Will’s newspaper column has been syndicated by The Washington Post since 1974. Today it appears twice weekly in just under 400 newspapers in the United States and in Europe. In 1976, he became a regular contributing editor of Newsweek magazine, for which he provides a bimonthly back-page essay. In 1977 he won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in his newspaper columns.

Altogether, eight collections of Will’s Newsweek and Washington Post columns have been published, the most recent being With A Happy Eye But… : America and the World, 1997-2002 (2002). Will has also published three books on political theory, Statecraft as Soulcraft: What Government Does (1983), The New Season: A Spectator’s Guide to the 1988 Election (1987), Restoration: Congress, Term Limits and The Recovery of Deliberative Democracy (1992) and One Man’s America: The Pleasures and Provocations of our Singular Nation (2008). In 1990, Will published Men At Work: The Craft of Baseball, which topped The New York Times best-seller list for two months. In 1998, Scribner published Bunts: Curt Flood, Camden Yards, Pete Rose and Other Reflections on Baseball, a best-selling collection of new and previously published writings by Will on baseball. In July 2000, Will was a member of Major League Baseball’s Blue Ribbon Panel, examining baseball economics.

In 1981, Will became a founding panel member on ABC television’s This Week.

Will was born in Champaign, Illinois. He was educated at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, Oxford University and Princeton University, where he earned his Ph.D. He has taught political philosophy at Michigan State University, the University of Toronto and Harvard University. Will served as a staff member in the United States Senate from 1970 to 1972. From 1973 through 1976, he was the Washington editor of National Review magazine. Today, Will lives and works in the Washington, D.C. area.

CHERIE BLAIR

Cherie Blair is a leading human rights lawyer and a passionate campaigner for women’s equality across the world. She is the founder of the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women, which helps women achieve financial independence in countries where they have few advantages.

Having experienced the pressures of combining a demanding career with being the wife of Tony Blair and a mother of four, she’s also a strong advocate of work-life balance policies.

Tony Blair said his wife was “...an enormous source of strength and an extraordinary person in her own right. I never know how she manages with all the different things she does—the work, the family.” The New York Times wrote, “Cherie Blair is viewed as something of a wonder woman for her ability to balance her high-powered professional life, high-visibility public life and intensely consuming private life.”

There was nothing in Cherie Blair’s background to suggest such a distinguished career. Having been brought up by a single mother in a modest home in Liverpool, she was the first member of her family to attend university. But having won a place at the London School of Economics, she graduated with first-class honors in law and went on to top her year in her Bar examinations.

She met and married Tony Blair in 1980 when they were both lawyers. They have four children, the youngest, Leo, being the first born to a serving Prime Minister for over a century.

Cherie Blair combined her legal career with bringing up the family and, in 1995, was appointed Queen’s Counsel, as the most senior lawyers in England are known. She also serves as a part-time judge.

Cherie Blair’s much-anticipated autobiography, Speaking for Myself, was published in the Spring of 2008. It reached #1 on the London Times bestseller list within three days of sales.

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Tony Blair

Tony Blair served as Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland from May 1997 to June 2007. He was also the leader of Britain’s Labour Party (1994 to 2007) and the Member of Parliament for Sedgefield, England (1983 to 2007).

During his ten years as Prime Minister, Blair transformed Britain’s public services through a program of investment and reform in schools and hospitals, resulting in more children achieving better school results and more people receiving faster access to health care, with improved survival rates for cancer and coronary heart disease.

Blair has always been a strong advocate of a values-based, activist and multilateralist foreign policy—an agenda that combined tackling terrorism and intervention in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo and Sierra Leone, with action on issues like climate change, global poverty, Africa and the Middle East peace process. Blair is also widely credited for his contribution towards assisting the Northern Ireland peace process by helping jointly to negotiate the Good Friday Agreement and deliver a power-sharing government.

Blair continues to be active in public life. He has many interests, including his current role in the Middle East, which takes up the largest proportion of his time. He is working for the USA, UN, Russia and EU as the Quartet Representative, helping the Palestinians to prepare for statehood as part of the international community’s effort to secure peace.

Blair has launched the Tony Blair Faith Foundation to promote respect and understanding of and between the major religions and to make the case for faith as a force for good in the modern world. The foundation will work with Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists. Blair believes that faith will have great influence in how the challenges that globalization presents will be met.

Elie Wiesel

As the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Elie Wiesel has worked on behalf of oppressed people for much of his adult life. His personal experience of the Holocaust has led him to use his talents as an author, teacher and storyteller to defend human rights and peace throughout the world.

Born in Sighet, Romania, he was fifteen when he and his family were deported to Auschwitz. His mother and younger sister perished there. He and his father were later transported to Buchenwald, where his father died shortly before the camp was liberated in 1945.

After the war, Wiesel studied in Paris and eventually became a journalist in that city, yet he remained silent about his time in the death camps. During an interview with the French writer François Mauriac, he was persuaded to end that silence and wrote his memoir, Night. Since its publication in 1956 in Yiddish and in 1958 in French, Night has been translated into over thirty languages and millions of copies have been sold. In 2006, a revised English-language edition of Night featuring a new translation by Marion Wiesel was published, which Oprah Winfrey selected for her Book Club.

Soon after he received the Nobel Peace Prize, Wiesel and his wife Marion established The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. Its mission, rooted in the memory of the Holocaust, is to combat indifference, intolerance and injustice through international dialogue.

Wiesel’s work has earned him the United States Congressional Gold Medal (1985); the Medal of Liberty Award (1986); the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1992); the rank of Grand-Croix in the French Legion of Honor (2001); an honorary Knighthood of the British Empire awarded by Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II (2006) and the 2009 National Humanities Medal. In 1980, he became founding chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council.

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Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell has an incomparable gift for interpreting new ideas in the social sciences and making them understandable, practical and valuable to business and general audiences alike. As a result, in 2005, Time named Malcolm one of its 100 Most Influential People.

He is the author of three New York Times #1 bestsellers, The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers: The Story of Success. With his first book, Malcolm embedded the concept of The Tipping Point in our everyday vocabulary and gave organizations new tools for understanding how trends work. In Blink, he analyzed first impressions—the snap judgments that we all make unconsciously and instinctively—and he explores how we can master this important aspect of successful decision-making.

Malcolm’s book, Outliers: The Story of Success, is having an even greater impact than his first two books. In Outliers, Malcolm suggests an exciting new approach to helping people succeed by using the factors that really foster success. Outliers debuted as a #1 bestseller for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The San Francisco Chronicle, Barnes & Noble, and Publisher’s Weekly.

Malcolm is a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. His most recent bestseller, What the Dog Saw, is a compilation of essays from his writings in The New Yorker.

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ADAM GOPNIK

This award-winning journalist speaks with singular wit, eloquence and insight on modern life and culture. Adam writes for The New Yorker magazine and he has a genius for bringing people and their ideas to life in his presentations, for communicating the emotions behind ideas, and the feelings that ideas evoke in us, and their relevance to modern life.

His new book, Angels & Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life, looks at the birth of the modern era through the lives of two extraordinary people born within hours of each other 200 years ago.

Adam has a marvelous talent for opening the heart and showing us who we are through our relation to place, with a touch that is light and a wisdom that is deep.

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