Over at the Guardian site, they’re holding a contest for who can write the most ludicrous blurb for a Dan Brown novel, with predictably hilarious results. The inspiration for this antic is a pre-publication blurb written by Nicole Krauss, author of “The History of Love,” for the new novel by David Grossman, “To the End of the Land.” The literary blog Conversational Reading lodged the initial objection to Krauss’ blurb, which was prominently printed on the front cover of the advance reader’s copy:
Very rarely, a few times in a lifetime, you open a book and when you close it again nothing can ever be the same. Walls have been pulled down, barriers broken, a dimension of feeling, of existence itself, has opened in you that was not there before. “To the End of the Land” is a book of this magnitude. David Grossman may be the most gifted writer I’ve ever read; gifted not just because of his imagination, his energy, his originality, but because he has access to the unutterable, because he can look inside a person and discover the unique essence of her humanity. For twenty-six years he has been writing novels about what it means to defend this essence, this unique light, against a world designed to extinguish it. “To the End of the Land” is his most powerful, shattering, and unflinching story of this defense. To read it is to have yourself taken apart, undone, touched at the place of your own essence; it is to be turned back, as if after a long absence, into a human being.
Even the book’s publisher seems to have realized that Krauss’ praise is over-the-top and a bit icky; a commenter at Conversational Reading reported that his ARC of the novel featured an abbreviated version of the blurb.
It’s easy to ridicule Krauss for this hyperbolic extravaganza, but in her defense, she’s not a critic or an ad copywriter; she’s a novelist. She didn’t get paid to write that phalanx of clichés, and chances are she’d have preferred not to. It was a favor, intended to help out a fellow author.
The conventions and excesses of blurbology do invite mockery. (The term “blurb” is sometimes mistakenly used for the publisher-generated description printed on a book’s dust jacket — that’s actually the flap copy. “Blurb” really only applies to bylined endorsements by other authors or cultural figures.) Like anything that people would rather not do, blurb-writing usually isn’t done very well. So why is it done at all? Because you, dear reading public, persist in giving credence to it. Please stop.
For those unfamiliar with the process, here’s how it works. Once a reasonably finished draft of a manuscript has been completed, the author, at his publisher’s insistence, begins the grueling and humiliating process of begging blurbs from better-known writers. The aim is to score praise from established authors whose work has a similar appeal — a wacky, gay-positive memoirist will try for Augusten Burroughs or David Sedaris; a female writer of mordant short stories approaches Mary Gaitskill, and so on — but these can be nearly impossible to obtain.
The most prominent authors are inundated with such manuscripts, far more than they can ever read, especially if they hope to get on with their real job — which is, of course, writing their own books. Many have adopted a blanket no-blurb policy, and most of these will at least occasionally wind up departing from that policy, usually for personal reasons. They might do it for a good friend or a former student, or as a favor to their editor or agent.
So when publishing people look at the lineup of testimonials on the back of a new hardcover, they don’t see hints as to what the book they’re holding might be like. Instead, they see evidence of who the author knows, the influence of his or her agent, and which MFA program in creative writing he or she attended. In other words, blurbs are a product of all the stuff people claim to hate about publishing: its cliquishness and insularity.
And, in fact, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in publishing who wouldn’t agree with that judgment. Everyone seems to hate the process, from the authors who are compelled to plead for blurbs to the publishing professionals who have to lash their authors onto it, to the blurbers themselves, who often wind up walking a knife’s edge between honesty and generosity. It stands to reason that, if many blurbs are bestowed for extraliterary reasons like friendship or professional collegiality, then many of them are insincere.
Faint or highly strategic praise is a sign that the blurber was less than enthralled by the work. Perhaps in such cases the blurber ought to refuse to endorse the book at all, but this is hard to do if the author knows you’ve already read the manuscript. It would invariably lead to awkwardness and hurt feelings when the whole point of agreeing to do the blurb in the first place was to avoid both. “A sweet tale of first impressions, second chances” — to take one example from a blurb for a book that shall remain unnamed — is a quintessential example of noncommittal blurbology. (“Sweet” is, in my experience, not a word anyone uses to describe a novel they genuinely like.)
When even mediocre works get glowing blurbs, you end up with praise inflation. Without a doubt Nicole Krauss truly admires David Grossman, an Israeli author of impeccable international credentials but a relatively small American audience. He’s older and more accomplished than she is, but she’s had more success stateside and was recently named one of the best 20 fiction writers under 40 by the New Yorker. Like many young authors who have scored a hit among their peers, she’s eager to do what she can to draw more readers to a novelist she regards as a master.
But to convey the full power of her enthusiasm, Krauss has to distinguish her blurb from the usual run of exaggerated approval. Even a practiced critic can testify that positive reviews are the hardest of all to write, so when a relative novice is obliged to ratchet up her compliments to the stratosphere in, say, 100 words or less, is it any wonder that the results are atrocious?
Most of the people involved in this system are well-meaning: Blurbers want to help other authors, publishers want to win more attention for their books, and authors want to do everything they can to prove that their publishers’ faith in their work has been justified. The result, however, is broken and borderline (sometimes outright) corrupt.
A few celebrated authors have made a point of regularly seeking out and championing books by writers with whom they have no connection — Stephen King is the most prominent example. (That said, I haven’t found King’s recommendations particularly useful.) But overall, blurbs just aren’t very meaningful. Yet, apart from a minority of skeptics, much of the public still seems to take them at face value. One British publisher claims to have seen research showing that as many as 62 percent of book buyers choose titles on the basis of blurbs.
Anecdotal evidence from online discussions and personal experience confirms this baffling preference. “I liked [Sara Gruen's] ‘Water for Elephants,’” said a woman I spotted studying a copy of Lynn Cullen’s “The Creation of Eve” at my local bookstore, “so maybe I’ll like this one, too.” (Gruen called Cullen’s book “enormously satisfying.”) I haven’t read either book myself, so I can’t weigh in on any similarity between them; for all I know Gruen meant every word of that praise. But when I suggested to this reader that blurbs can be unreliable, she glanced at me as if I were the one with the ulterior motive, nodded vaguely and drifted away, book in hand.
Referenced in this article:
The Guardian invites readers to outblurb Grossman’s literary admirers.
Conversational Reading complains about Krauss’ ‘painfully overwrought blurb.
James Spackman of Hodder & Stoughton describes a study on the power of blurbs by Book Marketing Limited.
The news that no Pulitzer Prize for fiction would be awarded this year came like a slap across the face to a book world still reeling from a Department of Justice suit filed against publishers trying to forestall an Amazon e-book monopoly. Double ouch! But does the Pulitzer snub mean that no good fiction was published in America last year?
I would (and have) argued otherwise, most strenuously; 2011 was an exceptional year for fiction, American and otherwise. I also suspect that the Pulitzer Board itself has not turned up its collective nose at every book produced by American novelists and short story writers in 2011. The Pulitzer Prize may wield far more clout with book buyers than any other American prize for fiction. It can turn an obscure title into a success and a modestly successful title into a bestseller. Readers take it seriously and snap up the books it honors by the thousands. But that doesn’t mean that the Pulitzer Prize for fiction doesn’t suffer from the same problems that afflict every literary prize, no matter its size or influence.
I have some insight into those problems because I served on the Pulitzer fiction jury two years ago. I can’t talk about my jury’s deliberations, however — that was part of the deal. I can tell you that choosing the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction is a two-tier process, a fact that even people well-versed in the literary world tend to forget.
The first tier is the jury’s selection. Three jurors (usually an academic, a critic and a fiction writer) are responsible for wading through huge boxfuls of books. Anyone can submit his or her book to the Pulitzer competition for a small fee, and believe me: anyone does. We got hundreds and hundreds of them, including many self-published novels with titles like “The Bikinis of Alpha Centauri,” most of which read as if they’d been run through Google Translate into Farsi and then run back again into English before being committed to print.
From the many submissions, the jury picks three titles to recommend to the Pulitzer Board, and the board picks the actual winner, as well as selecting the winners of all the other Pulitzer Prizes. The board does have the option to select a title not on the jury’s list, but it rarely does so nowadays.
The heyday for picking no book at all was the 1970s, a time of considerable cultural upheaval and conflict. In 1971, the board rejected titles from Eudora Welty, Saul Bellow and Joyce Carol Oates. In 1974, a stellar jury consisting of Benjamin DeMott, Elizabeth Hardwick and Alfred Kazin (three titans of literary criticism) unanimously recommended that the prize go to Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow.” The Pulitzer Board dug in its heels and said no. In 1977, the last time the prize was not awarded, the jury favored ”A River Runs Through It” by Norman Maclean and the board shut them down.
Why? According to the critic and experimental novelist William Gass, who wrote a notorious diatribe on the subject, the Pulitzer Board’s taste is hopelessly mainstream, middlebrow and unadventurous. (In 1941, most of the board did pick Ernest Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” but one member — who happened to be the president of Columbia University — put the kibosh on that because he considered the book immoral.) However, Gass’ complaint seems an absurd cavil to level against an institution whose power and influence resides precisely in the fact that it speaks to a broad audience.
The Pulitzer Board consists of working journalists and journalism professors, most with a deep respect for literature but relatively little familiarity with the literary world. This can be a strength and a weakness. The Pulitzer’s excellent record at singling out literary works that also appeal to a lot of readers is one reason why it has so much more influence than “insider” prizes like the National Book Award.
However, because the Pulitzer Board is fairly representative of educated Americans, it surely includes a lot of people who don’t really have time to read fiction — or, at least, literary fiction — anymore. Past boards might have been able to settle on a title that most of them had read even if it wasn’t offered as a finalist by the jury; reading at least a few of the “big” novels published during the year was something a lot more people did before the Internet and cable TV came along. In 21st-century America, the novel has become a marginalized and Balkanized art form, and even when avid fiction fans compare notes, they often find they’ve read nothing in common.
Chances are good that the three novels recommended by this year’s Pulitzer jury — “Swamplandia!” by Karen Russell, “Train Dreams” by Denis Johnson, and “The Pale King” by David Foster Wallace — are the only three serious new novels many of the board members read last year, apart, perhaps, from one or two others. These people are, after all, pretty busy doing things like editing the Denver Post and running the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, jobs that are a lot more time-consuming than they used to be, as well as selecting the winners in the other Pulitzer categories.
By all accounts, the group could not reach a majority on any of the three titles recommended by the jury. It’s certainly unlikely that enough of them read fiction widely enough to agree on an alternate choice. In that, they truly are representative of American readers, and that bodes worse for our national literature than a year without a Pulitzer winner.
The card in the mail delivered sad news, disguised as progress. Shonen Jump magazine, a monthly digest of translated-into-English Japanese manga,, was ceasing print publication. Instead, subscribers were invited to sign up for Shonen Jump Alpha an online-only feed of new manga (the Japanese term for comic books). Shonen Jump Alpha, declared the card, would be a great bargain! There would be more manga content available than ever before, and new chapters in ongoing serials would be posted on a sprightly weekly basis.
My heart sank, however, because I knew someone who was going to be very disappointed. My son. Four years earlier, I’d given Eli a subscription to Shonen Jump as a birthday present. It was a gift that kept on giving. My son has unimpeachable bona fides as a member of the digital generation, swimming in a sea of texts and video games and YouTube channels as effortlessly and naturally as a dolphin in the South Pacific, but I’m not sure I ever saw him more happy or content or intently transfixed as he was on those days when a new Shonen Jump arrived. He would curl up on our living room couch with the gloriously fat magazine — sometimes several hundred pages in length — and devour the latest adventures of Naruto and One Piece and Bleach.
He kept all his back issues in his room, engulfing shelves and floor space. He read and reread them. He delighted in pointing out to me particularly absurd illustrations that demonstrated some oddball aspect of Japanese humor. I loved it. As a hardcore fanboy myself from way back, I deeply appreciate geeky enthusiasms — I got almost as much pleasure watching him enjoy Shonen Jump as he did from reading them.
I emailed him the news (he was at his mom’s house). The next morning, when he stopped by to pick up something on his way to school, I asked if he’d read my email. His shoulders slumped.
“It’s so depressing,” he said. “Why would they do that?”
There wasn’t quite enough time to explain, right then, the devastating impact of online distribution on the publishing world, a fact of post-Internet life that had massively affected his father’s career as a journalist. I told him we’d talk about it later and watched him bike off to school. But at the same time, I mulled over an unexpected contradiction. My son is a member of the first generation for whom the Internet was a part of daily life from the cradle onward. To him, Wi-Fi is as normal as air itself, and the first answer to any question is a Google search. But just like any aging boomer eyeing a Kindle with suspicion and swearing undying allegiance to real books, he too was feeling a sense of loss and uncertainty, of destabilizing change.
As an inveterate early adopter of new technologies, I’d always assumed that the cultural resistance to new online distribution mediums was functionally generational. The older we are the less we like change. But for every grumbling codger who departs this mortal coil there’s a new baby born who seems to know how to do a two-finger swipe on an iPhone touch screen right out of the womb. And yet here was a clear example of a bond with the printed word, the material object, that transcended generational divisions. Eli told me to he wanted me to sign him up for Shonen Jump Alpha, but he didn’t seem enthused by the prospect of reading the latest installments of his favorite manga on the flat screen. If my 14-year-old could be transformed into a crotchety old codger, then maybe, just maybe, the culture really is losing something valuable as everything goes virtual.
I will admit that there are some ironies at play here. I write these words as someone who has earned his living writing for the Web since 1995. Just a few weeks ago, distressed at the appalling selection of books in the Atlanta airport, I borrowed my daughter’s Kindle to download a science-fiction novel to get me through the six-hour flight back to California — and I took a great deal of satisfaction in doing so. Take that, you crappy, lowest-common-denominator, mass market airport bookstore: The Internet works for me.
My son doesn’t have a Kindle, but I doubt it will be all that long before he’s curling up on the couch with an iPad or his own smartphone, gleefully tapping into a selection of entertainment options — including every manga ever published — vastly superior in terms of variety and comprehensiveness than any publishing medium ever invented. It’s quite possible that Eli just got caught in a clumsy transition moment, a brief stage of publishing confusion that will vanish in a future where everything we want is incredibly convenient.
There might even be some compelling reasons for Shonen Jump’s shift. When I asked Shonen Jump why the print mag was being discontinued, Alvin Lu, the senior vice president and general manager for Viz Media, Shonen Jump’s publisher, told me that readers would benefit from the new format.
“The growth of digital distribution has presented an opportunity to publish these serial manga narratives weekly,” wrote Lu in an email, “which is how they appear in Japan and, even from the very beginning of the print magazine, is something we’ve wanted to do, but couldn’t given the logistics. The situation is somewhat comparable to, say, following your favorite U.S. TV show, but only being able to watch a new episode once a month or only on DVD, instead of its ‘natural’ weekly schedule. The added benefit with ALPHA is that we’re moving toward simultaneity with the original Japanese publication, so we’re erasing the ‘tape delay’ effect as well. As I’ve been telling people, manga is very much a LIVE medium in Japan and with WEEKLY SHONEN JUMP ALPHA for the first time American readers can experience this as well. More than ever, readers of SHONEN JUMP series will be able to experience new chapters together (in the span of a week), communally.”
But Lu did not dismiss the impact of a down economy and the harsh competitive pressure exerted on all publishers by online distribution. Above and beyond my dismay at seeing a cherished part of my son’s life disappear, there’s an economic aspect to this narrative that is troubling to anyone who makes a living from publishing. It’s harder and harder to make a buck in this business, something I know personally, and something that’s clearly true for Viz Media. In 2010, Shonen Jump reduced its publication frequency from 12 months to 10, while at the same time, Viz went through a couple of rounds of layoffs. The bankruptcy and closure of Borders delivered a huge blow to Viz (in addition to Shonen Jump, the company also publishes hundreds of manga in the form of paperback graphic novels).
Can a revenue stream based on online advertising and subscriptions keep Shonen Jump a viable concern? Who will pay for the translations from Japanese if the numbers don’t add up? Everyone in publishing asks a version of this question every single day, and there are no clear answers. I am willing to hold out the possibility that innovative approaches will lead the industry out of this morass — maybe Shonen Jump Alpha will be one of the success stories! But when I first heard the news that the April issue of Shonen Jump will be the last one to drop through my mail slot with its tantalizing thump, I heard, yet again, the sound of a harsh economy and technological changing forcing some tough, unpalatable decisions. And I really have no idea where this is all going to end.
A passage from Stephen Greenblatt’s new book, “Swerve,” on Renaissance book culture, has this to say about how writers paid their bills several centuries ago:
Authors made nothing from the sale of their books; their profits derived from the wealthy patron to whom the work was dedicated. (The arrangement — which helps to account for the fulsome flattery of dedicatory epistles — seems odd to us, but it had an impressive stability, remaining in place until the invention of copyright in the 18th century.)
We’re so accustomed to thinking of copyright as the foundation of a writer’s livelihood that it’s difficult to imagine how authors could survive without it. Yet we may need to start doing just that.
Our current copyright laws and (often ham-fisted) attempts to enforce them have many critics, but you don’t see a lot of people advocating their complete eradication. They don’t really need to. The biggest threat to copyright comes from the advent of digital reproduction, which has made piracy much, much easier. Reform could well be beside the point; copyright seems poised to die the death of a million cut-and-pastes.
If that happens, and authors can again expect to make nothing from the sale of their books, how will they get by? The majority of authors, of course, can’t make a living from book sales as it is. They teach or work for the phone company or scrape together enough grants and fellowships to keep a roof over their heads. It’s possible that writing books will become a hobby rather than a profession — like, say, golf — for all but the tiniest minority of superstars, people so famous they can charge fees to make personal appearances.
Writers are understandably dismayed by this scenario, but readers ought to be, too. The eight hours or more per day that your favorite authors will spend servicing air conditioners or drafting marketing reports is time they won’t have to devote to writing their next book, the one you’re so eager to read. That means fewer books from some of our most talented novelists, and perhaps fewer yet from historians and other nonfiction writers; the research for their work can take even more time than the actual writing.
If this comes to pass, we may indeed see a revival of the patronage model Greenblatt describes, with wealthy fans supplying the writers they admire with the funds they need to concentrate on their work. In truth, we already have an indirect version of this in the form of arts foundations underwritten by private donors. The notion of a writer being personally sponsored by a rich individual may strike the contemporary American as distasteful, but as Greenblatt points out, unless you want to dismiss the entire corpus of Western literature written before the 1700s, you have to admit that the arrangement can produce great books.
Still, it’s a system inclined to serve the interests of the rich, and it’s not like we need any more of that. Recently, the technology that led to this dilemma has also offered a potential solution in the form of crowdsourced patronage. The best-known of these new funding platforms is Kickstarter, a website that allows people to raise money for all kinds of projects, including books (and magazines and bookstores). The would-be creator presents a proposal consisting of a written description of the project, a list of premiums awarded to donors depending on the amount they pledge, and, most important, a video pitch. The creator sets a funding goal and a closing date for the proposal. If the full amount isn’t reached by the time the proposal expires, the creator gets nothing.
The donors to a Kickstarter project don’t own any rights to the results, but their donations can win them such unusual benefits as having characters named after them in a forthcoming novel. The author may promise to write an ancillary short story about the supporting character of their choice. Other authors provide special signed editions of the book or, in a few cases, even a chance to offer input while the work is in progress.
On Kickstarter, book proposals have attracted from as much as $85,000 (for a memoir about psychedelic visionary Terence McKenna, to be written by his younger brother) to as a little as $324 (to commission original cover art for a self-published e-book). The more modest the goal, the more likely it will be met. At the very least, a Kickstarter project looks like an excellent way to cadge money from friends and family without having to face them in person with your hand out. The average successful proposal seems to run a few thousand bucks — not as much as a traditional hardcover book advance, certainly, but more than what many writers might get from a small press.
This fundraising method is perfect for modest projects aimed at a limited, but still keen, readership. The earnest confessional poetry of Anne Jackson, for example, would never find much favor in the poetry establishment, but there are enough investors moved by her story of creative struggle following a close friend’s death to contribute a total of $11,700 for an e-book of “poetry, photos & stories behind them.” Quite a few traditionally published poets would regard that as a decent advance. It helps that Jackson already has a following as a result of the spiritually oriented self-help books she wrote for a traditional publisher — and that she’s young and personable.
Many aspiring writers fantasize about the audience they’d find if interlopers like publishers and agents would stop coming between them and the reading public. Publishers, they complain, fixate too much on superficial assets like a mediagenic face or personality, influential connections, an established name or a promotional “platform” instead of just concentrating on literary merit.
To judge by what works on Kickstarter, however, democracy won’t offer any improvement. Those flashy garnishes are exactly what the public cares about. The most successful book projects have an already-established audience, an attractive creator, a high-concept premise and/or an affiliation with someone famous. Above all, as Rob Walker observed in the New York Times, a stand-out video presentation is crucial to sealing the Kickstarter deal.
April Winchell, the founder of the humor site Regretsy.com, for example, raised an impressive $65,ooo to publish a book of fake Finnish folklore and pay for a trip to Finland by calling on her established fan base and putting together a hilarious video. Does anyone really care much about the book — or, for that matter, about an edition of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” in which every instance of the word “nigger” has been replaced with the word “robot”? Probably not. Yet both pitches are amusing enough to elicit a surprisingly large number of small, what-the-hell pledges.
A classic midlist novelist who published two books with small presses but couldn’t place his third, Scott Morris managed to raise $12,700 to help him keep working on it. Would he have been as successful if he didn’t look like the popular conception of a ruggedly sensitive writer, or if his video didn’t feature several handsome and vaguely familiar actors (the guy who played the Winklevoss twins in “The Social Network”!) talking him up? Hard to say.
Whatever the merit of these individual projects, it’s hard for a reader to get enthused about a system in which the worth of a writer’s next book is judged by his or her ability to make a catchy video. The correlation between those two skills is far from obvious, as Jonathan Franzen demonstrated in the promo video he was obliged to make for “Freedom.”
With primarily visual works — comics and art or photo books — Kickstarter seems a great way to solicit the extra cash needed to produce top-drawer work. Comics creators have flocked to it, hoping to finish discontinued series or add color to black-and-white books. But can it bring us the next Ann Patchett or Robert A. Caro? Or is that another part of our future that will be determined by billionaires?
Montana’s attorney general is scrutinizing the charity run by “Three Cups of Tea” co-author Greg Mortenson after reports questioned whether Mortenson benefited from money donated to build schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Attorney General Steve Bullock’s announcement Tuesday follows investigations by “60 Minutes” and author Jon Krakauer into inaccuracies in the book and spending by the Bozeman, Mont.-based Central Asia Institute.
Bullock oversees nonprofit corporations operating in the state. He has been in contact with attorneys for the agency, and they have pledged their full cooperation, he said in a statement to The Associated Press.
“While looking into this issue, my office will not jump to any conclusions — but we have a responsibility to make sure charitable assets are used for their intended purposes,” he said in the statement.
“Three Cups of Tea” was released in 2006 and sold more than 3 million copies. That notoriety helped Mortenson grow the Central Asia Institute by generating more than $50 million in donations, Krakauer said.
According to the charity’s website, it has “successfully established over 170 schools” and helped educate over 68,000 students, with an emphasis on girls’ education.
Krakauer, author of “Into the Wild,” cast doubt on Mortenson’s story of being lost in 1993 while mountain climbing in rural Pakistan and stumbling upon the village of Korphe, where the residents helped him recuperate and he promised to build a school. Krakauer called it a “myth.”
“Mortenson has lied about the noble deeds he has done, the risks he has taken, the people he has met, the number of schools he has built,” Krakauer wrote in the recently published “Three Cups of Deceit.”
Krakauer reported that millions of dollars donated to the Central Asia Institute were spent on chartered jets, equipment and advertising for Mortenson’s books, even though the charity doesn’t receive any royalties for them. One former board member told Krakauer that Mortenson “regards CAI as his personal ATM.”
Mortenson and officials with the charity did not return calls and emails for comment from the AP. Charity officials told the Bozeman Daily Chronicle on Tuesday that Mortenson was being treated at a Bozeman hospital for a heart ailment.
Anne Beyersdorfer, who was named temporary director of the Central Asia Institute, told the newspaper that doctors will repair a hole in Mortenson’s aortic ventricular wall next week. She says he has low oxygen levels in his blood and has canceled appearances for two weeks.
Beyersdorfer, who described herself as a family friend, said Mortenson plans to set the record straight.
Bullock spokesman Kevin O’Brien said the attorney general’s inquiry has not reached the level of a full-scale investigation and it was not immediately clear exactly what Bullock was seeking.
“Those are the things that are going to have to come out in the coming days,” O’Brien said.
Tax information filed with the Internal Revenue Service for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2009, the most recent available, put the charity’s expenses at $9.7 million. Of that, $3.9 million — about 41 percent — was spent on building materials, teacher salaries, scholarships and other expenses related to school building.
A larger amount, $4.6 million, was spent on what was described in the tax documents as “domestic outreach and education” and “lectures and guest appearances across the United States.” Mortenson, who is the Central Asia Institute’s executive director and a board member, received $180,747 in compensation that year.
More than $1.5 million of the charity’s expenses went to advertising and marketing Mortenson’s books.
In a recent interview with Outside magazine, Mortenson said he had done nothing wrong and that much of that money goes toward educating people in the U.S. about the need for the schools.
“Our education mission includes both educating young people in Pakistan and Afghanistan — especially girls — and educating the American public about how promoting education in these countries contributes to peace,” he told the magazine.
But, Mortenson added, the Central Asia Institute’s law firm produced an internal memo that he might be found in violation of IRS regulations regarding excess benefits if the Central Asia Institute were audited.
Mortenson hired an outside law firm in January to conduct an independent analysis of the charity. The firm concluded he had done nothing wrong, but recommended there be specific changes to separate Mortenson in some respects from the charity, he said.
Mortenson said he has been paying for all of his own travel since January, and the charter flights allowed him to pack more speaking engagements in.
Lying and cheating — there may not seem to be much of a difference when you’re the victim of either (or both), but as the ongoing furor over Greg Mortenson’s “Three Cups of Tea” indicates, there are some crucial distinctions.
Mortenson is a former trauma nurse who began working to educate children in impoverished tribal areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan in the mid-1990s. “Three Cups of Tea,” his first book, was written with David Oliver Relin and first published in 2006, becoming a longtime nonfiction bestseller when the paperback was released in 2007. The book is closely linked with the Central Asia Institute (CAI), a charity started by Mortenson to build schools in the area. Mortenson, a popular and charismatic speaker, pursues an intensive schedule of media and public appearances, selling books by the crateful and collecting donations for CAI.
Until last week, Mortenson was simply a celebrated humanitarian, but a “60 Minutes” exposé of both “Three Cups of Tea” and CAI has accused him of fabricating some of the incidents in the book and mismanaging the charity to the point of impropriety. Playing a key role in the segment was author and journalist Jon Krakauer, a disillusioned donor and former supporter of Mortenson, who has also published an 89-page article detailing Mortenson’s transgressions at the website byliner.com. (This article, “Three Cups of Deceit,” can be downloaded for free through April 20. After that, it can be purchased via Amazon.com’s Kindle Singles program. Krakauer has announced that he will donate the proceeds to the STOP Girl Trafficking program at the American Himalayan Foundation.)
It’s unfortunate that the Mortenson affair is being presented as a publishing scandal rather than a philanthropic one, because the case against the author (the lying) is less compelling than the case against the nonprofit director (the cheating).
“60 Minutes” and Krakauer have produced evidence that, contrary to Mortenson’s account in “Three Cups of Tea,” he was not taken in by Pakistani villagers and nursed back to health after becoming lost and debilitated during a descent from a mountain climbing expedition in 1993. They also contend that Mortenson misrepresented another incident in the book. He says he was “kidnapped by the Taliban” for several days; his “captors,” one of whom runs a respected research center in Pakistan, have indignantly insisted that they are not Taliban and that he was entertained as an honored and entirely voluntary guest in their ancestral homeland.
That’s the lying part. The cheating involves the excessive entanglement of Mortenson’s finances with those of CAI, a relationship characterized by the organization’s former treasurer as Mortenson’s treating CAI “as his own personal ATM.” Perhaps understandably, Mortenson considers CAI to be entirely his creation and therefore at his disposal whenever he needs something (chartered planes, say) to help him promote the cause. CAI pays the promotional expenses for “Three Cups of Tea” and its sequel, “Stones Into Schools,” but receives none of the royalties and very little of the income from Mortenson’s speaking engagements.
No one is quite accusing Mortenson of stealing, nor are they questioning his commitment to CAI’s mission. However, Krakauer presents persuasive evidence that Mortenson’s refusal to document any of his expenditures in the U.S. or in Central Asia — indeed, his refusal to be financially accountable to anyone — have made CAI dysfunctional and far less effective than it claims to be. No one knows what the money is spent on, and no one seems to be monitoring the results. At one point, CAI staff resorted to fabricating documentation in order to comply with an audit by an independent accounting firm.
At least some of the schools Mortenson takes credit for building are “ghost schools,” empty structures without students or teachers. Krakauer, after speaking to several former CAI employees, charges Mortenson with repeatedly subverting “efforts by his Montana-based staff to track effectively how many schools have been built, how much each school actually costs and how many schools are up and running.” Achievements that Mortenson claims in this department are not derived from verifiable records or facts, so any donations solicited on the basis of those claims could be regarded as obtained under false pretenses.
The evidence of Mortenson’s financial improprieties is solid; just how much he may have lied about the recuperation and kidnapping stories in “Three Cups of Tea” is both murkier and a bit irrelevant. It’s worth asking: Would it matter much whether either anecdote were true if Mortenson’s charitable work were above reproach and impeccably conducted? Would we even be having this conversation if CAI weren’t a hot mess?
“Three Cups of Tea” belongs to that category of inspirational nonfiction in which feel-good parables take precedence over strict truthfulness. Its object is to present a reassuring picture of the world as a place where all people are fundamentally the same underneath their cultural differences, where ordinary, well-meaning Americans can “make a difference” in the lives of poor Central Asians and fend off terrorism at the same time. Heartwarming anecdotes come with the territory and as with the happily-ever-after endings of romantic comedies, everyone tacitly agrees not to examine them too closely. “Three Cups of Tea” is a wonderful tool for eliciting donations for the very worthy cause of educating Afghan and Pakistani children, which is its purpose.
Comparisons to fabricating memoirists like James Frey are misguided. An artful account of the memoirist’s own experiences is all that the memoir has to offer its readers; if it doesn’t approximate the truth (at the very least as the author saw it), then it’s in bad faith.
But what “Three Cups of Tea” provides is something else, a feeling of comradely motivation and a symbol of plucky American virtue in the person of Greg Mortenson. If he has to massage some facts into a better story in order to create sentimental enthusiasm for his cause, many of his fans are more than willing to give him that. Pointing out that a couple of these stories aren’t true strikes them as self-serving nitpicking and pettifoggery that, above all, misses the big picture. “Greg is a man who has done more good for more people than anyone else I know,” read one comment posted to an interview with Mortenson about the controversy at OutsideOnline. “Yes, he’s fallible. But the work that CAI is doing literally transforms lives.”
Only maybe CAI isn’t transforming lives, or not transforming them nearly as well as it could or should be. This is the issue that has been half-buried by the fuss over whether or not Mortenson prevaricated about his stint in the village or being kidnapped. It’s understandable that journalists like Krakauer or the staff of “60 Minutes” might see such yarns as an outrage, but Mortenson isn’t a journalist and neither are most of the people who read and loved “Three Cups of Tea.” The far more substantive financial allegations against Mortenson are at risk of getting tossed out with the bathwater that amounts to the 50th iteration of the “lying memoirist” scandal.
Yes, that’s aggravating, but here’s the thing: If Mortenson spun an uplifting tale about the kindness of Pakistani village folk because it made for a better story, the media is now doing the same in how it chooses to cover his wrongdoing. Yet another mismanaged charity is not an especially buzz-worthy subject. But we love to read about lying authors and negligent publishers and all the other ne’er-do-wells who are dragging our literary culture to hell in a hand basket. (Never mind the recent revelations that John Steinbeck made up big chunks of his beloved memoir “Travels with Charley” — it was ever thus.) Lying makes for a fun story full of opportunities for righteous indignation, but cheating at a once-esteemed charity is just a bummer. And the best story always wins.
Further reading:
“60 Minutes” segment on Greg Mortenson
“Three Cups of Deceit,” Jon Krakauer’s long article about Greg Mortenson and the Central Asian Institute
An official statement from Greg Mortenson about charges against him
Outside Online’s interview with Greg Mortenson about the “60 Minutes” expose
Details from the covers of "Train Dreams," "Swamplandia!" and "The Pale King" 
(Credit: shonenjump.viz.com) 
(Credit: iStockphoto/NickS) 
FILE - In this July 15, 2009 file photo released by Department of Defense, Three Cups of Tea co-author Greg Mortenson shows the locations of future village schools to U.S. Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at the opening of Pushghar Village Girls School 60 miles north of Kabul in Panjshir Valley, Afghanistan. Montanas attorney general on Tuesday, April 19, 2011 told The Associated Press that he has launched an inquiry into the charity run by Mortenson, following investigations by 60 Minutes and author Jon Krakauer into inaccuracies in the book. (AP Photo/Department of Defense, U.S. Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Chad J. McNeeley)(Credit: AP) 
Greg Mortenson 
