greg mortensen, bs artist

[rob]

MAGIC!

[Hugh Conway]

Character assassination on Booukreev = bad

Character assassination on Mormons = good

 

How do magnets work?

 

It's not really character assassination to describe a climber as a conceited asshole, is it?

 

Always thought the Krakauer hate post-IntoThinAir was the standard sub-culture hero who makes it big and no longer belongs to the sub-culture so they need to find someone else to lionize that belongs to "them"

[j_b]

I thought that Krakauer wrote what he saw, which happened to not show Boukreev in the best light but I wouldn't call it character assassination. Either one thinks he had an important story to tell, or not, in which later case describinging Boukreev's behavior wouldn't have been necessary. The book pretty much said what I always thought of high altitude guiding so I don't have a problem with the content.

 

you don't need to win me over - i actually liked into thin air and the devils thumb essay is sweeeet - i would think you of all posters would politics though

 

Good reads. Under the banner of heaven is good too but I haven't read his book about Tillman. I am not sure why you think I'd be critical of jk.

[Bronco]

Having met Mr. Mortenson, I doubt he intentionally defrauded anyone and if anything was just too passive with his organization and it's accounting. I think Krakauer is just trying to sell some books. The story about the Taliban guys reporting to have "protected" Mortenson instead of holding him captive seems convenient. There seriously have to be bigger DB's to go after than Mortenson.

[ivan]

I am not sure why you think I'd be critical of jk.

i knew your weren't critical, just thought it odd that you wouldn't understand why others would be - you know well that politics in general, especially those of the climbing world, are very, very silly - for many, climbing everest, and especially writing about climbing everest, automatically makes you a lame-ass poser

[tvashtarkatena]

Not much bigger. His first book alone sold over 5 million copies.

 

[tvashtarkatena]

You know, the one people bought because they thought it was a true story.

 

Only it wasn't.

[j_b]

Silly me. In this context, it is ironic that his book does point to the lame-ass posers who climb Everest and the attending circus around guiding the mountain. Krakauer used to strike me as a very understated, affable type so unless he has changed, I'd suggest to his critics that they are likely quite wrong about him.

[rbw1966]

Krakauer? Understated? Are you sure you have read his writings before?

 

The Tillman book is hyperbole from page one. Thin Air started out as a magazine article for Outside. Understated?

[Hugh Conway]

Having met Mr. Mortenson, I doubt he intentionally defrauded anyone and if anything was just too passive with his organization and it's accounting.

 

Passive?

 

The allegations - including from a number of other people like Gordon Wiltsie is that he was anything but passive

[j_b]

Krakauer? Understated? Are you sure you have read his writings before?

 

The Tillman book is hyperbole from page one. Thin Air started out as a magazine article for Outside. Understated?

 

As I said, I haven't read the Tillman book but I read everything he wrote up to that point and I didn't find any of it especially overstated or whatever you are inferring. Or are you saying that by definition a book/magazine writer can't be understated?

 

Anyhow, I was talking about his personality years ago when I used to meet him on a regular basis and he struck me as a very low key, nice person.

[tvashtarkatena]

Silly me. In this context, it is ironic that his book does point to the lame-ass posers who climb Everest and the attending circus around guiding the mountain. Krakauer used to strike me as a very understated, affable type so unless he has changed, I'd suggest to his critics that they are likely quite wrong about him.

 

I'm talking about Mr. M., not K, foo.

 

K's always a good read. If somebody'd spent my $75K on chartered flights to sign a book that was fabricated, I'd be a wee bit pissed, too. He's got the power of the pen, and he's using it. Good for him.

 

[E-rock]

hoo the foo, now? foo

[Bronco]

Having met Mr. Mortenson, I doubt he intentionally defrauded anyone and if anything was just too passive with his organization and it's accounting.

Passive?

The allegations - including from a number of other people like Gordon Wiltsie is that he was anything but passive

 

I was just passing along my personal observations from meeting the guy and listening to his speech to 8th grade graduates in the Rural School District for which he did not charge a fee.

[num1mc]

I was just passing along my personal observations from meeting the guy and listening to his speech to 8th grade graduates in the Rural School District for which he did not charge a fee.

 

Where you the biggest, oldest or smartest kid in your class? Anyway, congratulations. Did any of the teachers hit up on you?

[Jim]

??? .....and that should be were, eh?

[j_b]

"I fully believe that sales of Three Cups of Tea will immediately have gone up following the column inches it has been getting, but [if the rumours are proven to be true] there may well be some much longer-term sales damage to the sort of humanitarian memoir genre in which Three Cups of Tea sits,"

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/apr/22/memoirists-lose-trust-book-buying-public

[Bronco]

I was just passing along my personal observations from meeting the guy and listening to his speech to 8th grade graduates in the Rural School District for which he did not charge a fee.

 

Where you the biggest, oldest or smartest kid in your class? Anyway, congratulations. Did any of the teachers hit up on you?

None of the above.

[KirkW]

Having read all of Krakauers books and much of the shit storm that they have incited I can say that, while I don't think these allegations should be discounted outright, I think Mortenson deserves better than he's getting. None of this has been proven and 60 minutes didn't exactly do a solid piece of journalism in regards to this story.

 

Most of Krakauers books have been disputed and rightfully so. His account of what happened on Everest doesn't even come close to matching that of the other people he climbed with. Into the wild was full of so many fabrications and twistings of the truth I would consider it a work of fiction. You could start with reading the coroners report and comparing it to the story told by JK. The Tillman book was nothing but a ton of accusations with no real evidence to back them up. Not that I believe the official line either and obviously what happened was real, real shitty but again JK just made up whatever he needed, to fill in the blanks.

 

For him to go after Mortenson because his ghost writer did the same thing is just retarded and makes him a bigger hypocrite than I could have imagined.

 

The media is having a field day with this but when compared to how most charities and large non-profits are run the CAI is pretty lean with a higher than average percentage of money going to help people than most organizations like this. As stated earlier much of the money spent to fly him around wasn't to market his book. It was to raise more money for the CAI. Which it did. So what's the problem?

[Hugh Conway]

KirkW can't be that dumb, can he?

[KirkW]

KirkW can't be that dumb, can he?

 

Well, considering I'm hanging around here discussing this with morons like you, I might be.

[num1mc]

 

 

"Into Thin Air" was primarily a first person account, and does seem to jive with the accounts of others. Boukerev does come off poorly, perhaps unjustifiably so.

 

I did not really come out of "Where men Find Glory" with anything other than the occurrences of fratricide is much much higher than we are led to believe. If you follow Krakauers math, friendly fire could account for about 80% of casualties not caused by IED's. Other than that, there may not have really been a lot of substance to the initial story, and that would have hampered Krakauer. The cover ups were more of a series of FUBAR's and half hearted attempts.

 

I think if you look at the time-line for the development of "Into The Wild", you will see that it was written before some of these scientific findings regarding toxins and the like. Could you elaborate further on these fabrications you find so common and disturbing?

 

The media is having a field day with this but when compared to how most charities and large non-profits are run the CAI is pretty lean with a higher than average percentage of money going to help people than most organizations like this. As stated earlier much of the money spent to fly him around wasn't to market his book. It was to raise more money for the CAI. Which it did. So what's the problem?

 

That does not seem true. Several sources in the media have examined CAI's IRS returns and budget as posted on their web-site. It appears that many costs were reported as program expenses when they truthfully were fund raising expenses. With this budgetary slight of hand, their program percentage costs were dramatically and improperly increased. Most people understand this, except for some die hard dupes.

 

The costs incurred by CAI to advertise Mortensons books and fly Mortenson around are at best marginal expenses by any non-profit, and in reality should have been bared by Mortenson alone. It is likely that these were a conflict of interest, forced down the throat of a weak board who is under the spell of a cult of personality, by an individual who has succumbed to his own hype.

 

Ron Judd had a front page article about Mortenson several days ago. He recounted that Mortenson telling in 2001 of his first entrance to Korphe was very similar to the story recounted in "Three Cups of Tea". The story in TCT was been identified as fiction, and Mortenson has claimed that the story was constructed by David Relin. But Ron Judd's 2001 interview with Mortenson was prior to David Relin and Mortenson even meeting. So GM's throwing David Relin under a bus to hide his own lies

Edited April 24, 2011 by num1mc

[lummox]

Clarification is a bitch:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2011/04/greg-mortenson-controversy.html

 

[wfinley]

Thread drift.... but what's up with people getting lost while coming out from K2? You'd think that given the infrastructure needed to attempt such a peak that there would be at least some sort of marked trail or at the very least a good map. From what I understand Mortenson getting lost isn't an isolated incident - it's happened before.

 

And props to Darsney for issuing a statement in support of Mortenson.

[num1mc]

The whole Kophe chapter is a minor part of this saga. What is really important is the millions of dollars that CAI spent on Greg Mortenson's books. These are facts which Greg Mortenson has confirmed, and which can be reviewed due to the fact they are IRS returns