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Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Journey to Change the World... One Child at a Time (The Young Reader's Edition) Greg Mortensen and David Oliver Relin, adapted by Sarah Thomson

Ok, so I read this before everything came out challenging the accuracy of Mortensen's story.

According to the book, after getting lost while coming off K2 after failing to reach the summit, Mortensen stumbled into a small Pakistani village. The villagers there took care of him as he regained his strength and health. When he saw that the kids had no school, but practiced writing in the mud every day even though a teacher only came three days a week, Greg promised to build the kids a school.

Raising the money and building the school was hard, but it got done and Greg built more schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan. He believes that through education comes peace.

Of course, now we're unsure how much of this really happened. BUT! Schools got built. Schools are good and I think that education brings economic prosperity and peace. Education is the key.

I tried to read the adult version of this and just couldn't get through it. The Young Reader's edition is much tighter! But, both books idolize Greg Mortensen. I guess it kinda makes sense, because the adult version was his memoir and I'm sure he meant it to also work as a fundraising tool for the Central Asian Institute. But, at the same time, these books present him as God's gift to the Pakistani people. Even before the revelations came out, I was questioning the book, because Greg just seemed too good to be real, like Nancy Drew or an Ibbotson romance heroine.

And it's sad that the book did this and it's sad that so much of the story might not be true, because it dilutes the importance and impact of education and schools. It dilutes the ways that kids here can help other kids around the world and promote friendship and understanding.

Today's round up is over at Wrapped in Foil.

Book Provided by... the publisher for Cybils 2009 consideration

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The book publishing industry is bracing itself for another scandal as one of the best-selling authors in recent years has been accused of fabricating parts of a popular memoir.

Greg Mortenson has been catapulted to celebrity since the 2006 publication of Three Cups of Tea, (Penguin Book Publishers) which he said was a non-fiction account of his travels in Pakistan. The book describes how in 1992, he got lost while descending from an attempt on K2, the world’s second-highest mountain, and was taken in by a group of villagers.

Mr Mortenson wrote that to repay that hospitality, he founded the Central Asia Institute, a non-profit foundation that builds schools in rural Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Three Cups of Tea, which has sold more than 4m copies, was published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin. Penguin, like the Financial Times, is owned by Pearson.

On Friday, 60 Minutes, the CBS news programme, aired a segment that called into question the veracity of many of the stories central to the book. On Monday, author Jon Krakauer, who appeared in the 60 Minutes segment, released a digital booklet Three Cups of Deceit, which chronicles what he says are fabricated parts of Mr Mortenson’s books.

Viking said it would review the book and its contents with Mr Mortenson. “Greg Mortenson’s work as a humanitarian in Afghanistan and Pakistan has provided tens of thousands of children with an education. 60 Minutes is a serious news organisation and in the wake of their report, Viking plans to carefully review the materials with the author,” it said.

If the story is proved to be even partly fabricated, it would be another black eye for the book publishers industry: several works of non-fiction have been shown to be at least partly fictionalised in recent years. Other examples include James Frey’s, A Million Little Pieces published by Random House Book Publishers, that became the investigative subject of the smoking gun website exposing the supposedly non-fiction book as largely fictional.

The 60 Minutes report pointed to several passages that it says are exaggerated or fabricated. It suggested Mr Mortenson did not visit Korphe, the village he describes in the book, until a year after his descent from K2.

In statements to the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, in his home town of Bozeman, Montana, Mr Mortenson acknowledged he had taken literary licence in parts of the story. “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.”

The 60 Minutes report also claimed that a group of Pakistani men who Mr Mortenson said were members of the Taliban who had kidnapped him, were in fact lawyers and other professionals, who were assigned to protect him.