Three Cups of Tea Narrator:

Third-Person (Objective)

Even though Greg Mortenson is the first-billed author on the cover, he doesn't write the book. If he did, him talking about himself in the third person would get weird fast. It's important to remember that even though David Oliver Relin is second-billed on the cover, he's the guy who wrote the book.

That said, Relin's gushing about Greg Mortenson can be a little hard to swallow. We're surprised he doesn't have the man just summoning thunderclouds to bring fresh water to the mountaintop villages and simply using his mind to levitate building supplies across gorges.

We're only using objective to describe the narration in a strictly literary sense, meaning Relin is incapable of diving into his subjects' minds. (We're pretty confident he would've been the first to tell us if Mortenson is telepathic, too.) Relin is very subjective in a journalistic sense, though—he idolizes the ground Mortenson walks on.

If there are embellishments in the book, it's difficult to determine whose fault it is. Mortenson's, for fudging details; Relin's, for exaggerating the facts and compressing events; or the public's for still believing that non-fiction means one hundred percent without-a-doubt true.