"A rollicking ride of intellectual discovery and emotional growth... his comic timing never fails"
-- The Wall Street Journal
"Pulls you in like a good sports story"
-- The New York Times Book Review
"Endearingly frank... jubilant... lighthearted and fast-paced"
-- New York Newsday
"A surprisingly touching memoir"
-- Entertainment Weekly
"Snappy and informative"
-- Associated Press
"Effortlessly funny and informative... tender, human, and very wise... A must for anyone who loves Jeopardy!, or has ever seen it, or is breathing."
-- Joss Whedon, creator, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
"I haven't seen Jeopardy! since I was a kid, and yet I was charmed and amused by Bob Harris's fascinating and surprisingly suspenseful book. Through sheer force of personality, he takes this brainy TV show and makes it funny and easy to relate to."
-- Ira Glass, creator and host, This American Life
"A surprisingly intimate, entertaining book."
-- Orson Scott Card, 4-time Hugo Award winner, author of Ender's Game
"Funny, enlightening -- and just might help you win a million bucks on Jeopardy!"
-- A. J. Jacobs, author of The Know-It-All
"A masterful job of describing the feel of Jeopardy! in the heat of battle... I knew Bob was a great guy and a fantastic Jeopardy! player. Now I've found that he's also a wonderful writer. I think I'm starting to hate him."
-- Brad Rutter, top money-winner in Jeopardy! history
“Revelatory... Harris's sly wit and infectious curiosity make understanding world chaos fascinating... witty, horrific, and necessary.”
—Boston Globe
"Brave... irreverent... charges into the thick of the globe's myriad simmering wars... hilariously relaxed."
— New York Observer
"Only Bob could make a user’s guide to our increasingly hostile world this absorbing, this breezy, and—ultimately—this hopeful.”
—Ken Jennings, author of Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs
“Fascinating, enlightening, and surprisingly: NOT TOTALLY DEPRESSING. A gimlet-eyed look at the world we endure that’s also suitable for enjoying with a gimlet.”
— John Hodgman, author of The Areas of My Expertise and correspondent for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
"All three [presidential] candidates should read all three of these [recommended] books, but McCain gets first crack at Bob Harris's "Who Hates Whom“... a lighthearted overview of the insurrections and civil wars in the world today."
—Steven Pinker, author of The Stuff of Thought, in the New York Times Book Review
Longtime visitors have probably noticed a plug for Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought in the left column since shortly after the book was released last fall. (Granted, this may have been hard to spot under the excessive Trebekistan-flogging that I need to trim -- I kinda got carried away.)
Pinker is one of the world's leading cognitive scientists and linguistic theorists, so if your own brain is remotely interested in itself, it should read his work. You and your brain might even get along better.
So this morning, the New York Times Book Review asked a bunch of prominent writers which books they'd recommend to the presidential candidates. Imagine my surprise at seeing the first book Pinker himself mentions:
"All three candidates should read all three of these books, but McCain gets first crack at Bob Harris’s “Who Hates Whom: Well-Armed Fanatics, Intractable Conflicts, and Various Things Blowing Up.” A lighthearted overview of the insurrections and civil wars in the world today, it will help you tell your Sunnis from your Shiites, remember which Congo is which (it’s so hard to keep them straight!) and remind you whether the Waziris are on our side or not."
This is like being in a garage band and finding out that Dave Matthews is recommending your jam tapes.
My appreciation to Prof. Pinker, and I return the recommendation tenfold. Albeit in a forum one ten-thousandth the size.
For a teeny paperback that came out over two months ago without any big-paper reviews even expected, a write-up in this week's Sunday Boston Globe was certainly a pleasant surprise:
"[I]ntriguingly informative... revelatory -- and wryly funny about some very serious subjects... Harris's sly wit and infectious curiosity make understanding world chaos fascinating reading... witty, horrific, and necessary..."
Holy crap. Think she liked it much?
If you want a copy (or ten, heck, it's the holidays!), here's the Amazon link.
Or just click on the giant flashing animated gif of the book at the top of the page. Subtle, I know.
My thanks to the Firedoglake Book Salon, which this online chat with yours truly this weekend concerning Who Hates Whom, a book you may have noticed mentioned discreetly somewhere on this site.
And my apologies for being too busy this week to blog about it properly. Meant to. Just swamped as usual. Sorry if you missed it and would have enjoyed it. My bad.
Watching CNN today, 11:14 am PT, as they're coming back from a commercial.
"Three of the stories we're working on..." the anchor intones, highlighting these:
Al Gore wins the Nobel Peace Prize,
Ted Kennedy undergoes surgery, and
"Eight search warrants have been served in the death of Anna Nicole Smith..."
Come on. Do we have to? Annalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead, again splashed across literally hundreds of newspapers and TV stations? Thankfully, it's hardly the wall-to-wall all-else-annihilating festival of eight months ago (see the cartoon below for a quick review of other things that happened that day). But still. Aagh.
Just to review this news cycle's largest events which may have been neglected, depending on which "news" show one's eyeballs fell on, in favor of today's yellow-alert Anna Nicolitude: the US and Russia are getting notably tense. So are the US and Turkey -- and just as Turkey and the Kurds could blow up any minute, with large implications for Iraq. To the good, Israel and the Palestinians are making headway for once, but in Sudan, things blew up again badly in Darfur the other day, while desperately needed peace talks in South Sudan have now gone all wobbly, after decades of war there which have killed maybe 1.5 to two million people.
(Sadly, this last grim news was fairly predictable; southern Sudan has been in a state of civil war pretty much straight through since before independence even began in 1956, with the exception of one 11-year break that ended in 1983 and this fresh flail at peace starting in 2005. None of which I recall even hearing about until writing Who Hates Whom. Despite the death toll. And today's failure, which may set off another horrid war, seems to have gone nearly 100% unnoticed in the US press. Again. Depressed sigh.)
Almost eight hours later, Anderson Cooper (whose work I often respect greatly) and his producers chose to make the Annalissimo one of their top three lead stories as well. By evening, Ted Kennedy's bloodstream and Al Gore's award had been replaced by (a) retired Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez verbally fragging his former civilian commanders and (b) a police-custody death in the Phoenix airport.
Only Anna Nicole still remained in the top three.
Forgive me, but I feel compelled to repost this video, reviewing the other teensy stuff that happened on the day Anna Nicole died:
Woke up this morning to find myself (in round-shouldered cartoon form, anyway) suddenly on the front page of Salon.com, thanks to the mad genius of Scott Bateman:
(UPDATED: apologies for some weird error that made the animation work fine in every browser except Safari. Fixed. And here's a permalink to the cartoon itself.)
(Say, my griping about ad-driven media has just been revealed as mid-range hypocrisy. Still, it won't be full-on until you see this site running ads from, I dunno, TexacoBurgerKing or whatever, and then running pieces about how the new PetroGriller With Cheese is both yummy and non-toxic. Then the hypocrisy will be complete.)
Hey, some actual good news in international politics.
"Nuclear Deal Reached With North Korea," says an actual NY Times headline today:
Under an agreement reached in February, North Korea has shut down its Yongbyon facility, but the reactor still has to be fully disabled. According to Xinhua, the agreement today foresees the disablement of the five-megawatt experimental reactor, the reprocessing plant and the nuclear fuel rod fabrication facility in Yongbyon by December 31, 2007.
The progress in the disarmament talks came as the leaders of North and South Korea began the second day of a separate three-day summit meeting in Pyongyang, only the second such meeting between the states since the Korean Peninsula was divided in 1945.
As I've mentioned, you may not have heard about the deal when it happened, because it came the same day as Anna Nicole Smith's death. And we all know what the media considers truly important.
Not to be too much I-told-you-so, but here's a bit of the North Korea chapter in my new book Who Hates Whom, just released last week (and Juche, btw, is the ruling party's philosophy of absolute national self-reliance, particularly insane in a small, poor country with limited resources):
In the past, Kim Jong-Il has been willing to trade nuclear stoppages for aid, and in early 2007, that's precisely the deal on the table...
A generation of Koreans has reached midlife with no memory of the Korean War; their kids don't even remember the Cold War. With families split across the border, both sides realize that war would be ruinous, and -- perhaps most important -- conglomerates like Samsung and Hyundai would like to market to the one-third of the country north of the border.
Unification is already happening -- gradually. North and South have competed as one "Korea" in several international events, TV ads in the South now feature stars from both countries, and the 2008 unified Korean Olympic team plans to travel together to Beijing on a rail line through North Korea, an unprecedented opening. Baby steps. Patience...
Bottom line: the son groomed by Kim Jong-Il as his replacement fell out of favor in 2001... for sneaking off to Disneyland.
Juche, my ass.
North Korea is even freakier than I'd realized. Did you know they have their own calendar, placing the beginning of time at Kim Il-Sung's birth? In Pyongyang, it's not 2007; it's 96. And the anthem to Great Leader opens with imagery of blood-soaked hillsides. Ewww.
My favorite tidbit in this chapter: Kim Jong-Il once kidnapped a prominent South Korean actress and her film director husband, hoping to kick-start the North Korean movie industry. The result: a monster movie in which a lizard-shaped rice ball turns into a giant beast that eats iron. He brings peace to a village but then eats the heroine and dies. The end.
I have got to put that in the Netflix queue.
And if that sounds like a fun read, I hope you'll grab a copy of Who Hates Whom.
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