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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Main  Round the World Civilization Number Ten: notes from Troy, now in a country which borders on Iraq
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Civilization Number Ten: notes from Troy, now in a country which borders on Iraq |
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Thursday, 16 December 2004 |
Yet another note from Turkey, this time including the letter "i", and again interrupting the ongoing daily GOP maelstrom. Which, I must add, I find I do not miss one bit.
In the last week, I've been traveling by bus up the Aegean coast, a part of the world I didn't realize I dearly needed to see until I was here. It's physically beautiful, of course, but that's not the why. The people have been spectacular, as I've mentioned, but that's not it, either. Searching for words...
In school they taught little more than a brief blur about this part of the world, and the thousands of years of history connected to it. Sumeria this and Persia that and the dance king of Assyria was MC Hammurabi.
It's a whole other deal to stand in a museum here in Istanbul and look at the first known peace treaty in human history, signed in Akkadian (the lingua franca of the time) by representatives of the Hittite dynasty and Ramses II of Egypt. Like, right in front of you. There it is. Bam. The actual piece of clay they pressed their styli into.
Promising, I add, brotherhood between their peoples forever.
And as we all know, there has been peace in the Mideast ever since...
Kinda hard not to take the long view, looking at that.
The other day I was in Troy. (Yup. That Troy, although it actually has remarkably little to do with a well-oiled Brad Pitt pirouetting in a leather skirt. Thank God.) You get past the cheesy giant wooden horse for people to pose with, and put aside your amusement that the site now has corporate sponsorship (this driveway brought to you by Siemens!), and forget that there's no firm evidence Homer was even describing a specific site, writing as he was 500 years after events supposedly occured.
And finally, you just open your eyes and look at the amazing mound of human residue before you, whatever the hell it was: this "Troy" wasn't just one city, but 9 different major settlements (and dozens of smaller yet discernible redevelopments) constructed, destroyed or abandoned, and then rebuilt over thousands of years.
Think about that. Thousands of years.
People built entire civilizations on the spot. They flourished. They rose. They were pretty sure they knew what the hell they were doing. And then they were gone.
And a few hundred years went by. And somebody else got things together, and rebuilt right on top of what came before. And they flourished. They were sure they were the real deal. And then... poof.
Over and over and over again.
You stand there and look at the overlapping maze of half-standing walls and walkways and try to let the passage of lives and cultures and time itself sink in.
The modern stuff, the big Siemens signs and all that... suddenly it just looks like Civilization Number Ten here, in a series that nobody realized might never end.
For me, it was a bit like looking at stars at night and trying to grasp the vastness of space. You really can't; all you can do is understand a general sense of really big, and the limitations of your own imagination. And you can start to grasp how little of the past we even know, much less attempt to learn from.
It's not like there aren't a few themes that sorta jump out. Wars over resources. Violence and propaganda to achieve and maintain power. Brief spasms of relative enlightenment punctuating a remarkably brutal history. (And really, wasn't your history education largely a long series of who-fought-who? Mine sure was.) And every war ever fought was for a cause seen as noble and righteous by the people on both sides.
It's deeply disturbing to realize just how many millions of people have died in wars whose entire purposes are now barely remembered by a few scholars.
Yesterday I had a nice stroll in through a lovely park where a chariot-race Hippodrome once stood. Today I learned that 30,000 people were once massacred on the site.
And here's the thing: if I gave you the details, trust me -- you probably wouldn't recognize a single thing.
Not too far from here, near Konya, archeologists are studying the early human civilization of Catal Hoyuk, which appears to be (and this is a kick) roughly twice as old as the Egyptian pyramids. Nine thousand years ago, between five and ten thousand people lived in a fairly organized community in what is now central Turkey, with their own tools, art, and religion. And then... they disappeared.
About 4000 years passed before the Egyptians got around to building the pyramids.
You sort of have to give up the idea that human history is linear, or that progress is inevitable. It ain't. I pick up a newspaper, and now in our tenth millennium, humankind is still killing itself in the name of imagined gods.
Istanbul is also a fabulous reminder of how poorly we imagine the future. A short walk from here is the Hagia Sophia -- St. Sophie's, if you will -- a 1500-year old architectural miracle about 18 stories high with a nave the size of a football field. (This is one big building.) It was built as a Christian church, became (after a military conquest) a Muslim mosque, and now (after a secular government took power) stands as a multifaith museum.
But could the Christians in 532 realize they were in fact building what would one day become the greatest temple to a religion that didn't yet exist? Of course not. Did the Muslims who rehabbed the building for centuries realize that someday it would become a proud museum in a (supposedly) secular state? Aw, hell no.
Someday there will be people speaking languages vaguely resembling our own but indecipherable if we could eavesdrop. Their maps will not be our maps. And they will look at our wars over half-forgotten gods the same way you and I look at the struggles between the tribes of Ur, very possibly while killing each other in the name of gods which do not yet exist.
They will dig and puzzle and speak of the Oil Age and how its brevity stunned humankind toward the end.
If we make good choices, perhaps they will remember us fondly for they way we handled the first truly global period in human history, and they will carry our wisdom forward to our children's far descendants.
If we don't, they will more likely make small figurines of oxen and bury them in mud brick dwellings with their infant dead. With luck, maybe someday they'll develop bronze.
I wonder how we'll ever learn.
Not to get too dramatic or anything. And I have no idea how this applies to my daily life, much less yours. But the perspective... that's the why of this trip.
Speaking of Egypt, I'll be there soon... more coming then.
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