Greg Mortenson's 'Tea' brews up a controversy

[Night_stalker]

Greg Mortenson's 'Tea' brews up a controversy
By Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY

http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news ... 9_ST_N.htm
Greg Mortenson's publisher says it will "carefully review" a report by CBS' 60 Minutesthat the celebrated humanitarian and former mountain climber from Montana fabricated key parts of his best-selling memoir, Three Cups of Tea.

Author Greg Mortenson is under fire after 60 Minutes claimed in a report on Sunday that he fabricated large portions of his popular book Three Cups of Tea.

Mortenson, 53, who has sold more than 4 million copies of the book, has posted a defense (at ikat.org) of it and his charity which builds schools for girls in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He also revealed that he is facing surgery this week to repair a "hole in my heart" after returning home to Bozeman, Mont., in the wake of struggling with hypoxia (low oxygen saturation) in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, another best-selling author and mountain climber, Jon Krakauer (Into Thin Air), who criticized Mortenson on 60 Minutes Sunday night, is releasing his own 75-page exposé, Three Cups of Deceit: How Humanitarian Greg Mortenson Lost His Way (at byliner.com as a free download until Wednesday; $2.99 Kindle single after that).
Krakauer says he donated $75,000 to Mortenson's charity, the Central Asia Institute, before becoming concerned about its management.
Mortenson's publisher, Viking, issued a two-sentence statement Monday, a day after 60 Minutes reported what it called "serious questions about how millions of dollars have been spent, whether Mortenson is personally benefiting, and whether some of the most dramatic and inspiring stories in his books are even true."
Viking said, "Greg Mortenson's work as a humanitarian in Afghanistan and Pakistan has provided tens of thousands of children with an education. 60 Minutes is a serious news organization and in the wake of their report, Viking plans to carefully review the materials with the author."
Viking declined to answer questions about its review, or how much fact-checking was done before Mortenson's book, co-written with David Relin, was published in 1996. A sequel, Stones into Schools, was published in 2009.


On Saturday, after initial news stories, Viking said it relied on its authors "to tell the truth, and they are contractually obligated to do so."
Mortenson couldn't be reached, but wrote on his website: "The 60 Minutes program may appear to ask simple questions, but the answers are often complex, not easily encapsulated in 10-second sound bites."
He accused CBS of using "inaccurate information, innuendo and a microscopic focus on one year's (2009) IRS 990 financial, and a few points in the book, Three Cups of Tea, that occurred almost 18 years ago."
Among the issues is what Mortenson calls the turning point in his life: How in 1993 he failed in an attempt to reach the summit of K2, the world's second-highest peak, got lost and stumbled into Korphe, a small Pakistani village where he was nursed back to health.
By his account, a young girl in the village asked, "Can you help us build a school?" He says he promised to do so, which led to a charity that's raised $60 million.
But 60 Minutes reports that two porters who accompanied Mortenson say he never stumbled into Korphe lost and alone, and didn't visit the village until a year later.
Krakauer told 60 Minutes that Mortenson's account is "a beautiful story, and it's a lie. ... I have spoken to one of his companions, a close friend, who hiked out from K-2 with him, and this companion said Greg never heard of Korphe till a year later."
Mortenson disputes that. In his lone recent interview, he told the Bozeman Daily Chronicle that his account "is a compressed version of events that took place in the fall of 1993 ... What was done was to simplify the sequence of events for the purposes of telling what was, at times, a complicated story."
60 Minutes also noted that Mortenson's charity reports it's built or supported 141 schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan, but visits to 30 of them found that "roughly half were empty, built by someone else, or not receiving support at all."
On his website, Mortenson says he "was amazed to see how incredibly well everything is going there" (Afghanistan) and plans to build more than 60 schools this year.

Got to say, I thought there was something unusual about his book. It just seemed to be WAY too self-indulgent in my opinion. Of course, it also helps that everyone at school HAD to read it, which didn't go over well with me anyway.