Three Cups of Tea discussed on Wikipedia [accessed 5 April 2017]

Criticism

In 2010, South Asian scholar and anthropologist, Nosheen Ali, criticized Three Cups of Tea in that “it constructs a misleading narrative of terror in which the realities of Northern Pakistan and Muslim life-worlds are distorted through simplistic tropes of ignorance, backwardness and extremism, while histories of US geopolitics and violence are erased.”

In regard to Mortenson's management style at the Central Asia Institute, Nicholas D. Kristof, normally a supporter of his, has said that Mortenson is "utterly disorganized," and added, "I am deeply troubled that only 41 percent of the money raised in 2009 went to build schools." As a deeper look into Mortenson's business dealings, British journalist Jonathan Foreman wrote in a 2008 Daily Telegraph story that CAI's success is due in part to Mortenson's use of intuition and that he makes decisions at the last minute. Foreman further wrote that Mortenson is habitually late for meetings but that the combination of those traits work well and are important to the success of his work in the Balti region of Pakistan. Baltistanis have no tenses in their language, are vague on their timekeeping, and make their own decisions largely based on intuition.

Allegations

On the April 17, 2011 broadcast of CBS News’ 60 Minutes correspondent, Steve Kroft, alleged inaccuracies in Mortenson's books Three Cups of Tea and its sequel, Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan as well as financial improprieties in the operation of the Central Asia Institute. In particular, CBS News disputed Mortenson's claim that he got lost near K2 and ended up in Korphe; that he was captured by the Talibam in 1996; whether the number of schools built and supported by CAI is accurate; and the propriety in the use of CAI funds for Mortenson's book tours. 60 Minutes asked Mortenson for an interview before their broadcast, but he did not respond to their requests.

60 Minutes made the following allegations:

•    The events recounted in Three Cups of Tea—Mortenson getting lost on the way down from K2, stumbling into Korphe, and promising to build a school—did not take place.

•    The story recounted in Stones into Schools about Mortenson's capture by the Taliban did not occur. His purported kidnappers state he was a guest, and the Taliban did not exist in the country at that time.

•    Schools that the Central Asia Institute claims to have built either have not been built, have been built and abandoned, are used for other purposes such as grain storage, or have not been supported by CAI after they were built.

•    The amount of money Central Asia Institute spends on advertising Mortenson's books and paying the travel expenses of his speaking tours, including hiring private jets, is excessive relative to other comparable charitable institutions.

Jon Krakauer, a former financial supporter of CAI, has questioned Mortenson's accounts separately and was interviewed for the 60 Minutes segment. The day after the broadcast, Krakauer released his allegations in a lengthy online article, Three Cups of Deceit — How Greg Mortenson, Humanitarian Hero, Lost His Way. In the article, Krakauer documents how he had earlier been captivated by Mortenson's story, had donated substantial sums to CAI, and that he had later heard stories of misconduct and began investigating. Krakauer states that he invited Mortenson to address his allegations, including setting up an interview where Mortenson lives, but Mortenson subsequently canceled the interview.

Responses

Mortenson wrote a statement in response to the allegations made against him that was published in the Bozeman Chronicle: "I stand by the information conveyed in my book, and by the value of CAI's work in empowering local communities to build and operate schools that have educated more than 60,000 students." Mortenson further stated, "The time about our final days on K2 and ongoing journey to Korphe village and Skardu is a compressed version of events that took place in the fall of 1993..."

Scott Darsney, a respected mountaineer and friend of Greg Mortenson, wrote an email, subsequently turned into an exclusive article for Outside magazine's online version, as a response to the allegations against Mortenson. Darsney questioned the accuracy and fairness of both the Krakauer piece and the 60 Minutes report. Darsney had been interviewed by Krakauer, and maintained that Krakauer either misquoted or misunderstood what he said.

As a response to Krakauer's allegations, CAI produced a comprehensive list of projects completed over a period of years and projects CAI is currently working on. The list was released in December, 2011 (see external links below).

Lawsuits

In May 2011, Jean Price and Michele Reinhart, Democratic Party representatives in Montana, along with Dan Donovan, a Great Falls attorney, filed a class action lawsuit against Mortenson and are asking a federal judge in Missoula to place all proceeds from the purchases of Mortenson's books into a trust to be used for humanitarian purposes. The total of Mortenson's book sales to date stand at near $5 million. In June 2011, Jean Price announced she was dropping out of the suit, explaining that she had never read the book. In Illinois, former school teacher Deborah Netter, also dropped her Illinois lawsuit against Mortenson in early July 2011, joining the Montana lawsuit in mid-July. The Montana lawsuit was subsequently dismissed on April 30, 2012. In October 2013, a class-action lawsuit claiming damages against Greg Mortenson over Three Cups of Tea was rejected by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

A discussion of Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek, published in The Guardian, 6 December 2015

The nonfiction novels of Norman Mailer (The Executioner’s Song) or Truman Capote (In Cold Blood) changed the literary landscape, but the scope for further innovation was quickly noticed by the young Annie Dillard. “We’ve had the non-fiction novel,” she confided to her journal; “it’s time for the novelised book of nonfiction.” The book she was working on, Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek, is a classic instance of the nonfiction work of art. Having won a Pulitzer prize for nonfiction in 1975, it went on to become the source of some controversy when it was revealed that the famous opening paragraph – in which the author awakens in bed to find herself covered in paw prints of blood, after her cat, a fighting tom, has returned from his nocturnal ventures – is a fiction. It’s not that she’d made this story up: she adapted it, with permission, from something written by a postgrad student.

Extract from a review of In Patagonia published in The Paris Review, May 14 2013

While I was traveling in South America, a friend, a writer, heard I was heading down to Patagonia. At the end of an e-mail he broke into all caps: “DRINK LOTS OF WINE FUCK SHIT UP RIDE A HORSE AND READ SOME BRUCE CHATWIN.” Fortunately, my boyfriend and I had been drinking wine and fucking shit up plenty in Argentina already. While I like horses in theory, I haven’t had the desire to get on one since I saw National Velvet as a child. His last command, though, made me curse myself—I’d meant to buy a copy of the Chatwin before leaving the states. I figured it was now unlikely I’d find a copy in English. The next afternoon, we entered a Palermo Viejo bookstore. High on a shelf in the brief English-language section, I excitedly located a shrink-wrapped copy of the Penguin Classics edition of In Patagonia.

In his smart introduction, Chatwin biographer Nicholas Shakespeare describes his own experience of reading In Patagonia in Patagonia: “One morning, in a gesture soon to be repeated by a generation of backpackers, I was waiting for a bus in the dusty scrubland west of Trelew when I dug out a book I’d brought with me … I’d never heard of the author, but his was the only contemporary book I could find about my destination. I opened the first page and I read the first paragraph and that, really, was that.” Shakespeare summarizes the oft-told circumstances surrounding the book’s inception: There had been a bit of mangy, ancient hide in Chatwin’s grandmother’s cabinet of curiosities when he was a boy. It was from a brontosaurus, he’d been told, from Patagonia. This scrap—which actually belonged to a Patagonian ancient sloth—ignited a spark that lingered in Chatwin’s imagination. As an adult he’d already been Sotheby’s auctioneer and an archeologist before turning to writing. After years of work on an unsuccessful manuscript, he was reminded of his desire to visit Patagonia by octogenarian designer and architect Eileen Gray. It had long been her dream to visit Patagonia, as well, and she told him to “go on my behalf.” So he did. It is said—perhaps mythically—that he sent a cable to his employer, the London Sunday Times Magazine, stating, “Have gone to Patagonia.” He wasn’t heard from for months.

The manuscript he delivered to his editor, which was published in 1977, was career defining. It has been credited with reviving the moribund “travel writing” genre. It’s also safe to say it birthed intrigue about Patagonia in the minds of his many readers—Shakespeare’s “generation of backpackers.” In a story about hiking in Chilean Patagonia from early this year in the New York Times, Ondine Cohane writes that she’d wanted to travel to Patagonia ever since she’d read In Patagonia twenty years before, in high school. She writes that the book “drew me both to the place and in no small way to the profession of travel writing itself.” While Shakespeare is an exception to this trend—he had visited Patagonia in his youth before returning with Chatwin in tow—he states that of all the authors he’d read on the place, “none had validated my Patagonia as Chatwin had.”

I admittedly didn’t know much about Patagonia before going there; it was my boyfriend’s dream more than it was mine. Back home, I had glanced through some Lonely Planets and Rough Guides and only half-pictured lots of empty space and perhaps some beautiful peaks. By the time I’d finished Shakespeare’s introduction to the Chatwin, I felt convinced I’d never needed a book as badly as I needed In Patagonia in Patagonia.

Bruce Chatwin arrived in Buenos Aires in late 1974. He describes the Argentinean capital on his book’s fifth page. “The city kept reminding me of Russia,” he writes, “the cars of the secret police bristling with aerials; women with splayed haunches licking ice-cream in dusty parks; the same bullying statues; the pie-crust architecture, the same avenues that were not quite straight, giving the illusion of endless space and leading out into nowhere.” In Patagonia is short and composed of easily digestible page or two-page chapters. It mostly consists of jaunty, sharp descriptions such as this one, details arranged precisely by a narrator who seems candid, if a tad sassy. His adjectives are exquisite and his verbs active. Look here at how the images influence one another—how the ice cream is less appetizing because of the animal “haunches” and “licking” and “dusty” and how the “bullying” threatens the already vulnerable, almost silly “pie-crust.” Its conversational tone masks the great labor that must have gone into the sentence and most importantly allows a great deal to go unstated. He’s making you feel the contradictions, the exhausting contradictions, that make a place.

At eleven that night, we left the old apartment we’d let on Airbnb and ate steak and calf brains at a red-walled restaurant. The waiters were very prompt and presentational and set our wine cork upright onto the table with great intention. Crystals sparkled atop it.

In San Telmo’s plaza two tango dancers leaned against one another. The tourists applauded when each song announced its ending with a brisk chord. A host stood in front of his dead restaurant commanding passersby to eat. We walked home through the not-quite-straight streets. There was pie-crust architecture overhead, but also glass towers sparkling over the Rio Plata. I asked my boyfriend, who’s lived in Russia, whether Buenos Aires reminded him of there. He answered it sort of did, but not really.

We boarded a plane the next morning. I read as Chatwin walked and thumbed his way south, sleeping in the homes and barns of strangers, describing them and their stories in his way. Of the Welsh in Río Negro: “They chose Patagonia for its absolute remoteness and foul climate; they did not want to get rich.” A piano protégé in Gaimán: “He was a thin nervous boy with a drained face and eyes that watered in the wind. His hands were strong and red.” A band of drunk gauchos in Epuyen: “Their leader was a scrawny rough in the black bombachas and a black shirt open to his navel. His chest was covered with a fuzz of ginger hair and the same ginger bristles sprouted all over his face.” A European widow: “She smiled, her painted mouth unfurling as a red flag caught in a sudden breeze. Her hair was dyed dark-auburn. Her legs were a Mesopotamia of varicose veins. She still had the tatters of an extraordinary beauty.” There are also exiled pseudomonarchs, an Englishman Chatwin suspects has never been to England, a nostalgic Scot who’s only been to Scotland once, Indians, Boers, anarchists, prisoners, and, famously, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I could continue; if you haven’t already, you should just read the book.

Our destination was Ushauia, the southernmost city in the world. In the few hours it took us to cross over all of Patagonia, I had finished the Chatwin and sat with it in my lap, sighing over how beautifully he wrote; what a redeemer he was of literary nonfiction.

This same land had taken Chatwin months to cover forty years ago. Ushuaia he had found cold, in both senses of the word: “The blue-faced inhabitants of this apparently childless town glared at strangers unkindly. The men worked in a crab-cannery or in a naval yard, kept busy by a niggling cold war with Chile. The last house before the barracks was a brothel. Skull-white cabbages grew in the garden.”

I was surprised that Ushuaia’s airport was somewhat swank. It boasted a dramatic, slanted roof that seemed a bit much against the lulling Beagle Channel. We climbed into a boat-like cab. The town was visibly growing; its fringes were dotted with story poles. Half the houses we passed seemed to be B&Bs. Mountains loomed overhead and robust lupines dotted the shoulders. What’s changed since Chatwin’s time, I realized, is the cruise ships. Every day or so during the high season, behemoth Norwegians and Princesses and Celebrities rounding the horn or headed south to Antarctica dock in here. When they do the town swells by several thousand. The “blue-faced inhabitants” had to learn to smile at them.

A ship larger than the town I grew up was anchored at the port. Downtown, store after store advertised “end of the earth” T-shirts and stuffed penguins and boxes of Patagonia chocolate. Restaurant after restaurant served overpriced crab. Tourists swarmed like termites, shuffling up and down the town’s few streets with intention or boredom, their bags full of T-shirts and stuffed penguins, their bellies full of chocolate and crab.

We ducked into the three-room Fin del Mundo museum and paid the exorbitant fifteen dollars apiece to enter. One room’s walls were lined with a history of Tierra del Fuego in both Spanish and broken English. The second room displayed an assortment of stuffed birds behind glass. The third, behind a heavy velvet curtain, contained a projector playing a video on a loop for twelve white plastic chairs. The footage had been shot by an Italian in the early thirties and was mostly of the Yaghan Indians, who were some of the last Native Americans to live without seriously interacting with Europeans. Chatwin had managed to find what he was told was the last remaining Yaghans, with whom he converses, briefly.

I sat, as did a middle-aged American couple. They were evidently incapable of thinking things without articulating them. The man remarked often at his inability to tell “the males” from “the females” when discussing “the natives.”

I found myself growing angry with Chatwin.

Chatwin has had many critics and detractors over the years. He’s been pounded by academics for being a colonialist. He was one of the first homosexual celebrities in the UK to die of AIDS—in 1989, at a too-young forty-nine—which no doubt cast a pall for some time on his life and legacy, which I assume has righted itself. Mostly he’s been accused of Crimes Against Nonfiction. Many of the people he wrote about in this book and his subsequent ones accused him of writing everything from small errors to outright lies. He freely admitted to rearranging events, conflating characters, and so on, for the sake of his book as a whole—things I believe are surely allowed for the writer of literary nonfiction. Chatwin was no fan of the nonfiction and fiction division; he identified, I think correctly, that they were a product of “book marketing.” He eschewed the term “travel writing” so much he even asked his American agent that In Patagonia not be sold as such. The book is plainly a hybrid that includes travel writing, sure, and history, and myth, and imagination—the blend of which contributes to its originality and its brilliance. It reminded me of other motley works, like Invisible Cities, The Rings of Saturn, also Candide.

Yoga for people who can’t be bothered to do it: Interview transcript with Geoff Dyer in Salom.com published February 25^th 2003

In “The Rain Inside,” one of 11 essays in Geoff Dyer’s “Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It,” the author falls apart. Sitting in a Detroit diner called the Clique, looking out the window and noticing the rain, Dyer writes: “That day in the Clique I looked down and saw it was raining inside as well as outside. My egg-smeared plate was becoming wet. Drops of water were falling onto my toast, moistening my eggy hash browns. As I looked it rained harder and I could not see. I was crying.”

At the time of his ostensible breakdown, Dyer was visiting the Detroit Electronic Music Festival. His search for some sort of erotic encounter had failed, and one might assume that he was suffering from terrible loneliness. But readers ought to remember Dyer’s introduction to the book before diving into the rest: “Everything in this book really happened, but some of the things that happened only happened in my head; by the same token, all the things that didn’t happen didn’t happen there too.”

What’s remarkable is that you never know what’s fact and what’s fiction in Dyer’s essays and, perhaps more important, you don’t care. As in “Out of Sheer Rage,” a hilarious account of Dyer’s excruciating attempt to write a critical study of D.H. Lawrence, the essays in “Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It” defy categorization. They blend travel writing and memoir, criticism and fiction. The result is often exhilarating, and endlessly entertaining.

In his latest effort, Dyer travels from Rome to Libya to Indonesia to the Burning Man festival in the Black Rock Desert of northern Nevada. But he was in his favorite city of all, San Francisco, when he spoke to Salon about the one experience that nearly ruined him as a writer, why he doesn’t feel the pressure to write fiction anymore, and why, for writers, drugs should be tax deductible.

At the publisher’s luncheon for your new book you said that you were starting to feel that you didn’t have to write fiction anymore. Is that true? Why do you think that many writers think that writing fiction is the crowning achievement of their career?

I think the answer would have to be historical. Now more and more is being done in the “neither one thing or the other” realm, so I’m happy to be one of the people opening up that territory. It sort of bugs me that some of the most conventional or least novel things being written are actually novels. So often it seems to me that the whole form of many novels is close to a cliché. You notice it in the last 40 pages of a book, when you feel it all being driven towards its novelistic apotheosis and climax.

Do you read much contemporary fiction at this point?

Less and less as I get older. But then, when I read “The Corrections,” it was a fantastic experience of complete immersion in this other world. Recently in England Richard Yates has been rediscovered, so I read “Revolutionary Road,” and there is a thoroughly traditional novel that’s really, really gripping. Quite often now I can’t be bothered to go through the whole process of the novel becoming a novel. The remarkable thing about “The Corrections” is that it starts being amazingly gripping by Page 3. I recently read the new T.C. Boyle book, “Drop City,” which again I was loving from Page 2. So the experience is still available.

So you don’t have any plans to write another novel?

No, all the time that I was failing to write “Paris, Trance” I had this sense of regret and failure hanging over me because I’d always wanted to do my version of “Tender Is the Night.” And then I did it and it really did sum up what I wanted to say and let me work through my Fitzgerald thing. Now I feel happy in this first-person stuff which has elements of fiction but wouldn’t end up being classified as a novel.

I think I was always disadvantaged when it came to writing fiction in that I have never been able to think of stories or plots. There are ways of getting around that. There’s that famous E.M. Forster comment, “Oh dear, yes, the novel tells a story.” Still, plot and story are important parts of a novel. In addition to that, I felt I’d never been that strong on character either.

When I left university, I thought there were two ways to go: Either you became a writer, which meant you wrote novels, or you became a critic, which meant you wrote about other people’s novels. Then I discovered [the work of] these European people like Roland Barthes — it was commentary and it was incredibly imaginative. Walter Benjamin would be part of that. And then crucially there was John Berger, who, although he was English, seemed very much in that European mode of “neither one thing or the other”-type writing. His book on Picasso (“The Success and Failure of Picasso”), which was this incredible work of art history and art criticism, was also as gripping as a novel.

Extract from Patrick Leigh Fermor’s biography, Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure (2012) by Artemis Cooper

Elemér tried to persuade him to stay on, tempting him with the delights of the hunting season: chamois, stags and – he stayed on for the winter – bears. Yet Paddy felt he had already lingered at Guraszáda too long. Feeling very lonely for the first time in weeks he walked on towards Tomeşti, where he was expected by Herr Robert v. Winckler – a tall, thin, scholarly man, living alone with his books on the edge of a forest. Paddy was not long in his company, but it made a lasting impression. Winckler was the main ingredient in the composite portrait of the Polymath in A Time of Gifts.

By now it was high summer. For two days Paddy scrambled through valleys and foothills, heading south-west towards Caransebeş to avoid the main road to Lugoj. He missed the company of Xenia and Elemér, but being on the march again brought solace, and he was pleased to find that his strength and endurance returned quickly after the weeks of soft living.

In Between the Woods and the Water, Paddy extended and elaborated the bare facts of his south-easterly walk through the forests and canyons of the southern Carpathians. Time and place are blurred, new scenes are added. Line breaks become mysterious: sometimes they signal a change of tone, sometimes they seem to indicate a shift in time. The result is a passage that, over several pages, recreates with astonishing intensity the feeling of being alone in the mountains: the sense of release, of time expanding, all cords cut, and a heightened awareness of the natural world.