| |  | Authors: Greg Mortenson, David Oliver Relin
Publisher: Penguin Books
Category: Book
List Price: $16.00
Buy Used: $1.50
as of 9/8/2010 20:47 EDT details
You Save: $14.50 (91%)
New (204) Used (848) Collectible (2) from $1.50
Seller: kapfluger
Rating:  2377 reviews
Sales Rank: 43
Media: Paperback
Pages: 349
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.9
ISBN: 0143038257
Dewey Decimal Number: 371.82209549
EAN: 9780143038252
ASIN: 0143038257
Publication Date: January 30, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 2336-2340 of 2377
 Patronizing Narrator February 23, 2010
C. E. Selby (Miami Beach, FL)
6 out of 9 found this review helpful
Am I the only reader who got just beyond 50%--Kindle readers go by percentages, not pages--and had had enough of Greg Mortenson writing in third person. I saw Mr. Mortenson on Bill Moyer's Journal and was so impressed with him. But this book is so patronizing and so self-grandizing. It is as bloated as apparently his body became. It led me to three glasses of booze!
Unreadable February 16, 2008
R. Hamel (NH, US)
74 out of 113 found this review helpful
While I admire and respect Mortensen (sp?) for what he did, this book is 350-pages of minutia of events, without a bit of insight into the people.
Mortensen want to work on the school, but no! A tribe three or seven hours away has asked him over for a feast. He can't leave, but he must, so he treks in an old jeep to . . .
That's the story, detailing what he drank, what he wore, the grit and dirt on the road, but we never get inside the man. This would have been an astounding magazine article of 10 pages or so. But 350? Egads, no. For something infinitely more readable, and insightful, and as inspiring, read Tracy Kidder's book on Paul Farmer.
Accomplishment=fabulous Book=boring October 6, 2009
RI Reader
19 out of 29 found this review helpful
While Greg Mortensen's accomplishment's are to be highly praised, his personal life is just not that interesting. The book is infused with details of Mortensen's life in the states and these details read like a romance novel. Too little is told of life in Afganistan, of the children who attend the schools, of the impact on the local villages.
The writing is stilted, and the book enhances too many details with inept and akward descriptions.
Great story - writing style is choppy, painful to read March 18, 2009
Mary In Van (Vancouver, Canada)
9 out of 14 found this review helpful
While the story itself is interesting and the cause extremely important, the writing is painful! It's choppy, disjointed and poorly written. I regretted taking this book on my vacation and felt that after I read it, I didn't learn that much more about his story (I had already read a number of reviews, etc). I can't understand why more than 1,600 people on Amazon rated this book 4+ stars. I would rarely take the time to write a review but in this case, I felt that I must! Please don't bother - it a frustrating book to read because the quality of writing is so poor.
Read The Young Readers Edition Instead July 24, 2009
Barb Mechalke (in the lovely Finger Lakes Region of Upstate New York)
20 out of 31 found this review helpful
I this book up around page twenty wondering how people could stand to read it at all let alone enough to recommend it to others so that it would become a best seller. The writing was horrid and I could see that after reading as little as I did.
I'm so glad that there is a 'Young Readers Edition' of this book. That's what I read instead and I'm very glad that I did.
If you are thinking of reading this for the inspirational message it has I would suggest you choose the 'Young Readers Edition' where you will be spared David Oliver Relin's horrid writing and many details about Greg Mortenson's life that would probably have been better left private and unpublished, and you will be able to focus on what Mortenson accomplished and how important his work really is.
The story is an inspiration, the other things I mentioned can get in the way of appreciating how important Mortenson's accomplishments are.
I think this set a new standard for my book club, which we affectionately refer to as "the bad book club" and only one of us out of five of us even finished this copy of the book.
The endless rave reviews from other readers are in my opinion very misleading. I have to think that they are rating the inspiration and the importance of the story and not the writing. The writing deserves one star or less, the message of this story deserves five stars or more.
Showing reviews 2336-2340 of 2377
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