By Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY
Greg Mortenson's publisher says it will "carefully review" a report by CBS' 60 Minutes that the celebrated humanitarian and former mountain climber from Montana fabricated key parts of his best-selling memoir, Three Cups of Tea.
By Khyber Mortenson
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.
By Khyber Mortenson
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 expos�, 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 all proceeds from the sale of Three Cups of Deceit will be donated to the STOP Girl Trafficking program at the American Himalayan Foundation
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."
Entered Top 150: No.124 on March 15, 2007
Highest ranking: No.4 on Jan. 24, 2008
Weeks on list: 203
Viking declined to answer questions about its review or how much fact-checking was done of Mortenson's 1996 book, co-written by David Oliver Relin. 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 denied the major accusations against him in a lengthy interview with Outside magazine, posted at Outsideonline.com. His website says: "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 questions 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 has raised $60 million.
But 60 Minutes reported 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 K2 with him, and this companion said Greg never heard of Korphe till a year later."
Mortenson disputes that, while acknowledging the book "compressed" events to simplify the storytelling. He told Outside that Relin "did nearly all the writing," and that "in order to be convenient, there were some omissions and compressions."
60 Minutes noted that Mortenson's charity reports that it has built or supported 141 schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan, but visits to 30 of them found "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" in Afghanistan and plans to build more than 60 schools this year.
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