greg mortenson's school for kids want to read good and wanna learn to do other stuff good too

a good story in the hands of a shitty writer is as much of a waste as good wine is on someone like me. c.i.p. is david oliver relin, who wrote three cups of tea on the life work of greg mortenson, a good (great) guy suffering from a terminal case of white-man-must-save-the-world syndrome. it's a life that's traversed the himalayas, k2, remote pakistani villages and the minefields of american philanthropism. but under relin's "iowa writers' workshop/forty-national award"-winning pen, mortenson's work is rendered a lump excruciating cheese. on the other hand, you have a cocky bullshitter like michael lewis so immensely talented that he actually makes the world of bond trading actual seem like a jungle of mutant assholes. okay okay maybe that's not such a stretch of the imagination, but...in the war of wordsmithery, lewis wins. talk about the perfect career switch.

exhibition 1

win: "they had accepted their lot and, like the peasants in a breughel pastoral scene, were content to celebrate the simple pleasures of life." (lewis)

ha ha nice snarky art history reference thrown in there.

fail: "a shard of california sun gleamed in the stuffed monkey's scuffed plastic eyes before mortenson padlocked the house." (relin)

yeah, okay, seriously? what is this, a sixth grade adjective exercise? how many descriptive qualifiers do you think a sentence should have?


exhibition 2

win: "i was as helpless as the female victim of an arranged marriage who, upon first seeing the horrible visage of her chosen mate, shrieks in vain." (lewis)

ha ha, he's talking about being being selected for the equities department! followed by:

poured a few whiskeys into you, waited until the moon rose over the canyons of wall street, and positioned the circle line in view of the stock exchange."

fail: "the belief rippling around him was strong. it was powerful enough to convert a gas station into a holy place. who knew what other wonders of trasformation lay ahead."

this in reference to muslims turning to mecca to pray. a caltex gas sign happened to be in the line of vision, and david oliver relin takes the opportunity to wax poetic on the visually transformative powers of faith and religion and self-delusion.

exhibition 3

EPIC FAIL: "the pakistani military tried flying in bulldozers on a russian mi-17 heavy-lifting helicopter, but the inaugural flight, trying to maneuver through the high winds and narrow gorge, clipped a cliff and crashed into the indus, killing all nine aboard."

okay, SERIOUSLY? you went to iowa writers' workshop and you shit out a grammatically mangled sentence like this in a bestselling biography? a flight cannot maneuver through high winds, and cannot clip a cliff, nor can it crash into a river, you know why? flight is an action noun. it's not actually something tangible. but hey, you know what, a HELICOPTER, like the one you mention in the first part of the sentence, can crash into a cliff. subject-object confusion much? go back to writing school, bitch!