Both journalist Jon Krakauer and a 60 Minutes report questioned the authenticity of memoirs written by Greg Mortenson. As his publisher reviews his work, the author (pictured, via) defended himself in a long Outside magazine interview and a written response to 60 Minutes.
Here’s more from the Outside interview: “[Kevin Fedarko] wrote a Parade magazine article about me in 2003, and the Siachen story and Parade put us on the map. Then Lee Kravitz, who was the editor of Parade, called me and said, I’ve got a book writer for you. This was David Oliver Relin, who co-authored Three Cups of Tea with me and has joint copyright. That’s where some of the issues are. It’s really complicated, but I’m not a journalist. I don’t take a lot of notes. David and I collaborated. He did nearly all the writing, and along with hundreds of interviews of those involved in the story, I helped him piece together the whole timeline, and from that we started creating the narrative arc and everything.”
Here’s more from the 60 Minutes response (PDF link): “It is important to know that Balti people have a completely different notion about time. Even the Balti language — an archaic dialect of Tibetan — has only a vague concept of tenses and time. For example, ‘now’ can mean immediately or sometime over the course of a long season. The concept of past and future is rarely of concern.”
Follow this link to download a free copy of Krakauer’s 75-page expose until April 20th.