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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I Was A Teenage Swing-State Voter |
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Thursday, 14 October 2004 |
I grew up in Mentor, Ohio, a medium-distant suburb of Cleveland, right in the heart of key electoral territory. I just saw something that will make Kerry supporters worried about Ohio smile.
Mentor was the edge of development when I was a kid, and not in the current yuppie investment sense. Mentor was just where Cleveland ran out of people. Modest 2-bedroom homes dissolved into large stretches of open land. Behind my Mom's house was a big commercial flower nursery, and across the street from my elementary school, there was a field where somebody's horses ran around.
We were working class (Dad unloaded stuff for GM down at Fisher Body), the weather sucked, and biting insects from the nearby marsh were often so thick that as a toddler I remember thinking that slapping yourself was simply a part of going outside. But it was also pretty damned nice sometimes.
And our paper was the News-Herald, actually published over in Willoughby, with whose high school the Mentor Cardinals maintained a fierce if pointless rivalry, chronicled regularly in the News-Herald's pages. It was and is the kind of small-town paper (although they would bristle at the label) that will still run a photo of the Szymanskis, who have been married for 50 years, as a cover story.
Sometimes my sister and I would go miniature golfing across the street from the News-Herald building, and I remember wondering if one day I might grow up and work there. Sure enough, when I was 14, I was a paper boy, and when I was 20, I got my very
first check as a professional writer -- five dollars -- from the
News-Herald.
As to what the town's politics were like when I was a kid... Dad was in the UAW, and so were a lot of other dads. Almost everybody we knew supported their union, voted Democrat, and hated Nixon. But I also remember being told by a lady up the street that she "had nothing against black people" -- she just didn't "want them moving in here and destroying everything we have." (That quote is real, I promise -- it's burned into my brain, since it was the first time I ever
had to figure out how to continue liking someone possessed by a hateful
idea.)
Later on, while I was in college, I learned there was a word for this: Reagan Democrats.
Over the years, the town grew. Businesses, then malls, then strip malls, then big boxes. You can now drive from one end of Mentor to the other (down Mentor Avenue, of course), and except for a stretch near the home of President Garfield, you'll hardly ever leave commercial zoning.
The nursery is gone. Mentor now has so many malls that it's actually one of the top commercial centers in all of Ohio, ranking up near bigger towns like Akron and Dayton that you've actually heard of. My Mom's house now faces a vast array of hideous power lines, and the sound of the expanded interstate highway is always audible at night.
If you remember a recent national story about a spectacular, sudden house explosion, right in the middle of sleepy suburbia, instantly obliterating a quiet home into a pile of cinders surrounded by charred trees, proving that any of us could die horribly at any moment... that was right on our street, four houses down from Mom.
So Mentor doesn't feel quite the same these days.
And neither does the News-Herald. When I've visited home over the years, I've been chagrined to watch its editorial page evolve from right-leaning to Gingrich-favoring to Clinton-hating to hard-right Fox News levels of bias. (They would reply with outraged denials, I imagine. Guess I'm out all those five-dollar checks I could be getting.)
So imagine my surprise tonight, hitting Google News to see any last post-debate stories before toddling off to bed, to see the very top story linking to a piece in... the News-Herald.
And it's the AP story on the debate, now running as the top headline on the page.
Which means that your Reagan Democrat town in the heart of swing-voter country is about to carry the following lead sentence on the front page of the right-leaning newspaper:
Sen. John Kerry said Wednesday night that President Bush bears responsibility for a misguided war in Iraq, lost jobs at home and mounting millions without health care.
The rest of the AP story gives Bush his jabs, but the case for Kerry is far clearer, just as in the debates.
And if that's running in Mentor, in the News-Herald... it's everywhere.
PS: poking around, I just saw the byline of the guy who gave me that very first five-dollar professional writing assignment. I remember him as a good guy, not connected to and often annoyed by the editorial bias. And yet I see he's still plugging away, a hardworking writer doing his job, paying the mortgage, twenty years of hanging in.
Damn, I respect that.
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