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Books! Actual books!

"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

Books I'm Getting

Who Hates Whom:
Well-Armed Fanatics, Intractable Conflicts,
and Various Things Blowing Up —
A Woefully Incomplete Guide™

“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

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Monday, 31 July 2006

Update: those of you not from Cleveland will learn much about the town's self-image simply from the existence of this post.

To clarify: yes, parts of Los Angeles, as if this is not common knowledge, can have crappy weather sometimes, plus occasional chunky-style air. We get mudslides. We get smoke from wildfires. We get a bay as filthy as Lake Erie's long-ago worst every time it rains. We've got not just one frustrating baseball team, but two. Plus traffic that can rival some third world cities. Median home prices which start at roughly your wildest dreams and go from there. And a nice big seismic fault under our feet, which is deeply reassuring in the age of Katrina.

I left out the racial tensions, sprawl beyond imagining, and state government run by a right-wing Austrian. And yet I still love Los Angeles. Lots. Much as I still love Clevo.

Email I've glanced at (I never have time for it all anymore, sorry) looks maybe 5-to-1 able to comprehend that the following is not a comparison of one place to another, but a standard-issue, rather pedestrian complaint about the cheapness of sprawl anywhere. But since some Clevolians still freak the instant they hear a word that isn't praise for a comeback the city made a decade ago, rest assured: if I saw a Taco Bell worth praying to in Guatemala, I would write about it there.

[Post begins here.] In Ohio for a few days visiting family in and around the Snow Belt.

Some things never change. The Indians lost a game in the ninth inning a few minutes after my flight landed, so at least that was the same as always. And the weather is intolerable, which it usually is here, so that felt familiar.

Most of all, the conversion of the remaining bits of greenspace into a vast shopping imperium continues unabated. The small town I grew up in, which once had empty expanses of woods between little neighborhoods of small homes, is now a strip mall fiesta, one of the leading retail destinations in the entire state. The new Taco Bell is incredibly shiny. Really. If Taco Bell ever decides to become a religion, I now know what the cathedrals will look like.

Not far away, the newest megamall is another in the current fad of simulated-town monstrosities which architecturally remap selfish consumption as a form of community. Its name, which to me sounds like self-parody: Legacy Village. As if the great legacy of our forebears, one we will proudly fight to pass to our children, is the right to eat at Cheesecake Factory.

This is just a middle-aged guy looking at his old hometown and saying it's not what it used to be. Doesn't make it less true.

PS: can't we all just learn to enjoy the fact that the Indians do suck, possibly for years to come? (Much as this space guessed on Opening Night, just from looking at their ages and stat lines.) We can still love them. Roll with it. It's just a different kind of fun.