A former mountain climber and a celebrated humanitarian author, Greg Mortenson faced controversial allegations about his book “The Three Cups of Tea.” As per CBS’ 60 Minutes, according to the publisher of the book, they will “carefully review” it.
In 2011, Mortenson who was able to sold over 4 million copies of “Three Cups of Tea” faced the most challenging event in his life and filed a defense of the book and his charity that aims to build schools for children in Pakistan and Afghanistan at ikat.org. He also undergoes a surgery that time to treat the hole in his heart.
The Controversy
Mortenson controversy leaked because another author of best-seller books and also a mountain climber who wrote the book “Into Thin Air,” Jon Krakauer, criticized him on 60 minutes. Krakauer released a copy of 75 pages expose – “Three Cups of Deceit: How Humanitarian Greg Mortenson Lost His Way.”
According to Krakauer, before he became concerned about management of the Greg Mortenson’s charity, The Central Asia Institute, he donated $75, 000 to the institution. The publisher of Mortenson’s book – Vikings, released a statement that since the 60 minutes is questioning about how the author spend the multimillion revenue out of the published books, and that they are asking if the stories on the book are real, they will review the book more thoroughly. Although, Viking said that the humanitarian helped thousands of local children in Afghanistan and Pakistan were sent to education.
When the 60 minutes asked the publisher if how much fact checking are they doing out of Mortenson’s book, Vikings declined to answer. But, according to them, they relied on their authors to tell only the truth.
Response to Accusations
Meanwhile, Mortenson denied all the accusations in opposition to him. He said in a major interview conducted by Outside Magazine that the 60 minutes program by CBS is not using accurate information in their allegations. Their responses to simple questions are very complex and cannot even be encapsulated within 10 seconds. He also mentioned that what they only have is a microscopic focus against the book and only point-out very few details in the book that occurred 18 years past.
Mortensons did a very good story but according to Krakauer, it was all a lie. Mortenson said that while he was about to hike the world’s second highest peak mountain, he got lost and sick and landed to Kophre a small village in Pakistan. While he was there, he was nursed by a young girl and asked if he can help her to be sent to education. As per Mortenson, he promised the girl and formed the Charity.
But the 60 minutes and Krakauer conducted an investigation and found out that according to a reliable source, Mortenson was not stumbling alone in the hike and he didn’t got lost as well. He was not even in Kophre for about a year in contrary as what he wrote in his book. There are also findings that the Mortenson’s charity’s report of accomplishment has a lot of discrepancies and lies.
