Sarah's review

Great review! My bookclub is going to review this book tomorrow night and I will bring up a lot of the points that you made.

oh how i do love sarah...
let me count the f***ing ways girlfriend

you are one righteous sister with a silver tongue!

Outstanding review, Sarah. I liked the book for many of the same reasons, but got very frustrated with it toward the end. You hit it on the head--he was obsessive and he neglected his family for his cause, yet he is continually heralded as a hero by the author. I really wanted the author to remove those rose-colored lenses and make Mortenson a more realistic character, more human, and ultimately more interesting. Nicely put.

Thanks, Sarah, for your excellent review. I am currently reading this book for many of the same reasons you list. However, I'm also having some difficulty with the problems you list as well. At times the prose is so self serving and so unabashedly flattering that I find myself thinking more about the authors motivations than I do about the adventures being recounted. - Jim

Cultural Imperalism? Were you going for shock value so people would pay attention to your review? It found me and, whereas others felt your review was "excellent", "outstanding", and "great", I felt it was poor.

I disagree with this review on so many points. The reviewer treats this as a work of fiction, it's documenting the birth of this organization and how it grew and Greg Mortensons commitment to his cause. Others call him a hero, he struggles with the exposure and his time away from his family which has the full support of his wife who is equally responsible for the success of this program. Never did I see any evidence of what you call "cultural imperialism." What he started by accident, literally, has apparently turned into something that has done more to promote the future security of this country than all the billions of dollars flushed down the bottomless drain of waste, incompetence and misery by our current leaders.

If you read the review, she never accuses the author of cultural imperialism at all... Going into the book, it is entirely possible that this will turn out to be a shining example of cultural imperialism, and it is fair to be suspicious of that trend. White pseudo-hippy travels to foreign country and builds schools that teach the American way!

As the review mentions, the book shows the opposite - a man respectful of the culture he enters, and who trys to further these women as much as possible WITHIN the constraints of their religion and culture.

The reviewer's point is that Mr. Mortenson proves to be an exception to the American do-gooder tendency towards (usually) accidental cultural imperialism. I, like the reviewer, expected to be vaguely irritated by an American forcing his culture into somewhere it wouldn't fit, since many books about similar attempts praise these activists without realizing how naive and silly the projects end up being. As an example, have you read Kabul Beauty School? Or, to a lesser extent, Reading Lolita in Tehran?

I agreed with this review, though I gave it one more star than this reviewer. I was pleasantly surprised by this book's subject matter, though similarly frustrated with the constant hero worship and avoidance of Mortenson's flaws.

I couldn't disagree more with the review.

Considering what this guy has accomplished, I see no reason why the praise that is showered upon him by the people whom he has helped should be eliminated from the book.

What the heck difference does it make if a book has two authors? If I'm not mistaken, some pretty fantastic work has been created by two people collaborating.

I found the writing style to be quite interesting and fluid.

This guy is about as far from cultural imperialism as you can get. He is at the other end of the spectrum, constantly making sure he is respecting local customs. He never once pushes an American point of view.

The book does mention Greg's neuroses, sleeplessness, excessive travel away from his family, etc. While reading it, I TOTALLY got a sense for how long he was away, how difficult it must have been for his wife, etc. Going into great detail about his flaws in managing his time, the foundation, etc would have been entirely beside the point.

I hardly think Greg was writing the book to pat himself on the back. If you got that from reading it, you didn't pay attention to a word. If he was willing to live in a storage unit to save money for these schools, I hardly think he's the type of guy who just wants to write a book to publicize the fact that all these people think of him as a hero.

Sometimes readers over analyze a piece of writing so much that they don't see the forest for the trees. I, for one, am happy to know that there are great souls out there like Mr. Mortenson who make such great sacrifices for others.

The book is written like a work of fiction. That's why I had to put it down although I very much wanted to know about what Mortenson accomplished. I also just abandoned What is the What for the same reason. Autobiographies are by definition books written in the first person. However poor the writing skills, the person who lived through the experience knows what is important. The fiction writer or journalist can only guess and then present it in some stylized fashion that never quite rings true for me.