His Bottom Line: Educating the World's Kids

John Wood, a former Microsoft executive who left the company to found Room to Read, celebrates with students at the 2003 opening of a preschool in a Vietnamese village. (By Robert Poor -- Room To Read)

And there would certainly be a painting that evoked his passion for books: a preschool John, perhaps, sitting on the lap of his mother, grandmother or older sister as they read him "Green Eggs and Ham." Or a 10-year-old pedaling his bike back from the Athens library with the dozen volumes he'd negotiated instead of the normal maximum of eight.

All in all, an unusual boy. "If we hadn't had natural childbirth," says Carolyn Wood, "I would have said we got him mixed up in the nursery."

He went to college at the University of Colorado, got an MBA at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, did a stint in commercial banking. Then he got recruited by Microsoft, where he was hired despite showing up for his interview in a smirk-inducing banker's suit.

Flash forward almost a decade. Wood had driven himself hard. He loved exploring new places and had volunteered repeatedly for international assignments. Now he was rewarding himself with his longest vacation since joining Bill Gates's mega-corporation: three weeks of trekking in the Himalayas.

On the first day out, he struck up a conversation with a Nepalese man who turned out to be the "resource person" for 17 rural schools. The man told him that he really didn't have any resources to offer and that Nepal had a 70 percent illiteracy rate.

The next day, they toured a village school together. It had a room labeled "School Library," but there were no books in sight.

Where were they?

Locked up, Wood was told, before being shown a tiny collection made up of what looked like trekker castoffs: a Danielle Steel romance, an Umberto Ecco novel in Italian, a Lonely Planet guide to Mongolia, a copy of "Finnegans Wake." These random volumes were considered so precious, he writes, "that the teachers did not want to risk the children damaging them."

"Perhaps, sir," the headmaster suggested, "you will someday come back with books."

Okay.

From a cyber cafe in Kathmandu, he fired off an e-mail slugged "Books for Nepal -- Please Help" to everyone in his online address book. He asked them to send donations of books in care of his parents.

Thousands arrived. Wood flew home to help sort them. Then he and his dad -- with whom he'd never managed much emotional closeness -- embarked on a father-son bonding trip for the ages. Accompanying a book-laden donkey train to the Nepalese village, they found themselves walking through a human corridor of grateful children.