We actually have two Kindles at the moment, because Cissy's boss claims to be too busy to read and lent her his, thereby also exposing us to a Scandinavian financial industry ex-pat's choice of literature, which is much different from what we usually read (sci-fi/fantasy novels and Japanese detective stories, respectively): mostly non-fiction, with a smattering of these currently popular, disturbingly violent Swedish crime novels.

Three Cups of Tea is the 2007 autobiography by American Greg Mortenson, who after a failed attempt to climb K2 was sheltered by impoverished Pakistani villagers, and out of gratidute promised to build a school for their children. He has to struggle to raise the funds back in the States, and navigate his way around political, religious and other realities in Pakistan, but eventually the school gets built and the project develops into the Central Asia Institute, a charity which has since constructed more than fifty schools in the remote mountain areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

I am not too familiar with non-fiction, but what strikes me as odd is that while Greg Mortenson is listed as the main author (co-author David Oliver Relin appears to have done most of the writing), and he is the subject here, the book is written in the third person. It would have sounded more natural in the first person, more honest, and more subjective, which seems appropriate (especially in hind-sight) as it is just one man's account.

The book ends rather abruptly when Mortenson crosses from Pakistan into post-Taliban Afghanistan to resume his humanitarian efforts there. Wanting to know how that went, I opened Wikipedia and found that there is a second book that picks up where Three Cups ended. I also found depressing reports that over the last few months, very serious allegations have been made against Mortenson and his work, claiming that the events in his books have been highly fictionalized, that the Central Asia Institute is lacking financial accountability, that most part of the funds it raises are spent on book tours, and that many of the schools have since been repurposed or abandoned.

Jon Krakauer is selling a book called Three Cups of Deceit now, where he tells a very different story. I queued this one up as well, even though I am not really interested in what seems to be a very negative, very aggressive, very meticulous, and unforgiving report. Proceeds from Krakauer's book go to another Himalayan charity.

I do not doubt that the Central Asia Institute is an unaccountable mess (that's what it sounds like in Mortenson's book anyway), I would not be surprised if many of the events in the book are embellished or made up, and I do not blame Mortenson for not living on a shoe-string anymore. If Mortenson took a dollar and wasted 80 cents on himself or by being inefficient, that would still be 20 cents more than without him. Of course, if the dollar he was given would otherwise have gone to a "better" charity, that would be tragic (but it is not unlikely that the dollar would not have been raised at all without his inspirational exaggerations).

I just hope (and am still confident) that there was not really "deceit" or criminal intent involved (and I am willing to apply Pakistani standards here, not American ones), and that at the end of day there are more schools in the Himalayas than there were before Greg Mortenson visited the region.