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
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“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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Something I love about Los Angeles... and America |
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Saturday, 20 November 2004 |
Since I spend so much bandwidth carping about things that could be
better, maybe for once I should post something I really, really like
about where I live.
I live in Hollywood, which is actually just a district of Los Angeles.
It might sound glamourous, but the majority of this end of town is
still surprisingly middle-class, even with the recent insane real
estate boom. We get plenty of immigrants, and there are
well-established enclaves from many parts of the planet. And because
the area is modestly prosperous, a lot of the good service jobs here
attract immigrants from less-affordable nearby areas.
All of which means you meet good people from everywhere in the world,
every day, if you keep your eyes open. And that's a pretty amazing
thing.
Heck, I don't even need to leave my apartment building. Tonight I went
down to the rental office to pick up a package and met Samir, the new
security guy. He's from Nigeria. Told me stuff about what the
countryside looks like near the old capital. How cool is that? Some
nights the guy downstairs is Werner, a Salvadoran who amusedly indulges
my efforts to improve my broken Spanish. During the day, the place is
run by my friend Mona, a delightful Lebanese woman who speaks four
languages and puts up with bullshit in three of them on a daily basis.
The previous security guys were Leo, from Brest-Litovsk, and an
Egyptian whose name slips my mind but who had a wonderful laugh.
That's just in one room in this very building.
When you see L.A. on TV, it's usually all the crap up in the hills,
fancy gated houses perched precariously on rocky hillsides, spotlights
and Hummers and collagen. That's not the L.A. I live in or would want
to, although bits of it twinkle in the distance through my window.
My neighborhood is a place where Orthodox Jews and flamboyant gays
intermingle every day with white suburban hipsters and black kids from
Baldwin Hills, a place where the South African tea shop is a
five-minute walk from the place that serves Malaysian food on a banana
leaf. No, we don't all hold hands and sing "Kum Bay Yah," but you'll
see some of each at the Karaoke night at the Farmers Market. We get
along pretty damn well.
It dawned on me after going around the world last year that there's not
a single place I visited that didn't have somebody living in my adopted
hometown.
Think about that for a moment. It wasn't so long ago that something like that was a great, impossible project dreamed of in the abstract by idealists -- a world in which people of vastly different
cultures really can get along, respecting and listening to and learning
from each other. And man, that happens every damn day in my neighborhood, at least a little, and often quite a lot.
Of course, it's the nation we've always been in large part -- a nation of
immigrants, clamoring in a dozen languages in cities on every coast,
the vast majority working their honest asses off, doing right by other
people, expecting no more
than they earn and willing to get along with everybody else doing the
same damn thing.
That's the America I love.
That may not be George W. Bush's America, with its fanatic insistence
on one god, one economic ideology, one party, ein volk, ein reich, ein
vaterland, where absolute lies are so often used to question the
patriotism of anyone connected to reality.
But the reality is still here.
I bet that wherever you are, you might find more of this
constantly-changing, ever-hopeful, always-renewing-itself America
nearby than you might first guess. Maybe not to the UN-on-a-stick
degree in my little corner, but still.
In the daily swirl of fresh abominations, it's easy not to notice. But America, at its very finest, still
exists. In some places, in giant vivid glorious colors.
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