The scandal over the possible truthiness of Greg Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea leaves us with a lesson that apparently needs to be taught again and again.
The 17 April edition of 60 Minutes was surprisingly book-heavy for these tweetable times, with two segments being focused on recent books and, more particularly, on the men who wrote them. The second was the less eye-opening of the two, being a somewhat quizzical take on the new memoir by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. This is the same Allen who cashed out to a tune of some $40 billion, which he then spent on philanthropy, but more eye-catchingly on a Jimi Hendrix guitar, his own ocean-going yacht that’s bigger than a football field, and a hanger full of vintage war planes, not to mention a couple of pro sports franchises. Leslie Stahl looks at Allen crook-eyed while he awkwardly tells stories about what a screaming jerk Bill Gates was, and tells him that she’s getting a certain Howard Hughes vibe, as are those viewers paying attention…
The Gates story – about how he and Steve Ballmer supposedly conspired to dilute Allen’s share of the company after Allen was diagnosed with cancer – was the book’s attention-grabber that hooked people in. But pretty quickly it becomes apparent that that’s not the narrative 60 Minutes wants to pursue. The feeling the whole piece leaves one with is pretty sour, and will likely not result in anybody rushing out to get Allen’s book, Idea Man; a pretty astounding thing given that this is the man who was instrumental in creating the dominant corporate-technological apparatus of the late 20th century. The book is hobbled before it even gets out of the gate.
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