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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Egypt: Five Wonders |
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Wednesday, 20 October 2004 |
Originally posted September 5, 2004, while on the Almost Seven Wonders trip through Greece, Turkey, and Egypt:
Quick note home now that I've settled here in Cairo for a bit...
If
the Aegean coast of Turkey feels a bit like California, then Istanbul
feels like the San Francisco of the mideast. You've got hills and
density and a trading-post history and a whole lot of people packed at
funny angles into too little space, and even so the sea air smells
wonderful. (Although since Istanbul has been around in various forms
roughly ten times longer, perhaps I should reverse the phrasing: San
Francisco is the Istanbul of California.)
With that in mind, Cairo feels a lot more like New York, in almost every way I can think of. Urgent. Loud. Harried.
Basic
tourism first. Got up at 4:45 am to go watch the pyramids turn colors
as the sun rose against them. (Of the Seven: five down now, two to go.)
The
taxi driver, Tarik, knew a good spot to pull the car over on a fairly
deserted freeway overpass, then bribed a nearby cop so we could hang
out for an hour.
To pass the time while we watched, he regaled me with stories of people
he has driven around town, even showing me their business cards.
One of them was from Judith Miller of the New York Times. Hand to God.
I
told Tarik that she was the one who repeated Ahmed Chalabi's falsehoods
about Iraq, helping to start the war. Interestingly, he wasn't
particularly aghast or even surprised. Guy lives in Egypt. Knows a
thing or two about reporters who won't question certain things if it's
good for them.
Even
more enjoyable than the pyramid sunrise: the frenzied race to get
inside one. The tourism officials have a limit on how many wide-bodied
yokels like me they allow to go careening around the innards. Tarik
says it's only 150 for the whole morning. So the minute I get a good
picture from the overpass, Tarik's 1973 Mercedes (again, hand to God --
or Allah, I should say) is rocketing toward the entrance, weaving
between black-belching buses, melon-lugging horses, and shin-risking
pedestrians.
I go back and forth between giggling and just closing my eyes to wait for something to go squish.
Next
thing I know, it's 7:50 am, and we're in line for the 8 am-opening of
the entrance to the pyramids. When the flag goes up, every vehicle
will jockey for position to get to the parking and ticket booths in the
moments before the 150 get-you-inside tickets are gone, after which the
losers will by left to walk around, gawk, and wait for the next batch
on offer.
Tarik gets out and examines the competition already ahead of us: 6 buses, 4 private cars, and 3 minivans. I'm not hopeful.
Tarik just grins. "You watch. I am super driver."
Seconds
later, we're zigzagging across a dusty hillside, the Nixon-era Mercedes
heaving and groaning but handling each sudden jolt of speed and
G-force. Buses and minivans surrender one by one to Tarik's berserk
genius.
"Fuck you, bitch!" he says victoriously, in English, laughing, as one last bus of hopefuls concedes to his slashing rear fender.
And sure enough, we're suddenly... parked. Ten feet from the ticket counter.
Tarik has taken the checkered flag.
Now it's my turn, and I'm running -- running! because Tarik says I
must, and the frenzy is exhilarating -- toward the oldest crypt in the
history of humankind, the ten-minute race completely obscuring the
singularity of the climb I'm about to make.
It's only once I'm looking up into a pyramid from point-blank range
that I pause to touch the stones with attention, to breathe in deep and
tell my lungs to remember, to try to fully appreciate what I'm about to
experience.
To wit, as it happens:
Bend over into a
four-foot passageway. Climb, climb, climb, climb. Occasional places
to stand up, or a ladder to tackle. Climb climb. Anticipate. Climb.
Anticipate. Climb anticipate anticipate... aha!!! ...
An empty room.
Cool, though. Standing in a pyramid. Damn.
Aussie
guy behind me, Melbourne, construction trade, completely freaked out by
the sheer gigantor rockage -- perfect garage-sized rectangles of
ancient stone, somehow fitted together so tightly to appear as one.
"We didn't make these, mate," he says. Over and over. To me, to his
wife, to some Japanese people sweating in deep thought, to the air:
"We didn't make these, mate."
Not much else to do. Nods all around.
Climb climb climb down...
Rest
of the day just as stunning, little time, not sure you're interested,
and reluctant to be so precious as to think every detail worth
recounting.
Still... there's another experience I'll cherish far more than the pyramids.
Noon, blazing sun.
Tarik
has dropped me in Coptic Cairo, an agglutination of old churches,
mosques, synagogues, you name it. Decaying and holy as hell, serious
worshippers punctuated by a few waddling map-wielders gasping for air
and leaving a snail-trail of sunscreen. I'm in full-on Icon Overload,
buried for the moment in the same vault as somebody or other who knew
somebody who knew somebody who knew Jesus. The blur means it's time to
go away until I can come back actually knowing which particular
religion it is I'm incuriously hobnobbing.
So I walk, looking
for a Metro station. Seems close on the map. And I walk. And walk.
Wrong turn somewhere becoming obvious. Walk. Pretty soon, the
Egyptian sun joins me for the stroll, emphasizing how not-in-a-Metro I
am.
There's a Metro station on the map. And I'm sure that all
the people in that two-dimensional fantasy world are having a marvelous
time riding on it. But me, I'm walking. Starting to understand why
someone here would eventually consider the sun a god, with the power
over life and death. Hell yes.
Neighborhood's getting worse,
too. Warm smiles not so much now. More a series of increasingly
unpleasant glares. Could just be the heat. But I've been in enough
cities to feel a potential bad situation. Time to turn around.
Duck in a corner. Map. Where the hell. Shit. Maybe I can ask that guy selling fruit. He looks OK...
Suddenly,
a little boy, smiling up at me. Maybe 7 years old. He says something
in high-pitched Arabic. Three of his friends instantly appear. Older,
T-shirts and jeans, 10 years old, maybe 11. Arabic this and that, all
at once, looking at the map, my bag, my shoes, the color of my eyes.
Tourists very clearly do not walk here much. I'm saying (in fluent
Tourist) "Salaam" and "Ana ma takallam Arabaya" and mostly the world
"Metro."
The second-tallest one is evidently becoming the
ringleader. Showy if still-squeaky bravado, but still with hesitancy,
testing the role out. I like him. He points to what might be where I
need to be. Or, well, not.
We take about five steps before a
brief confrontation with one of the scariest, most powerful beings on
the planet: a parent. Sizing me
up, not the boys. Which tells me louder than any words that I can
trust these kids. Finally he smiles, nods. Brief handshake. Nice.
With
dad's permission, off we go. Marching through a part of town I doubt
you'll read about in Frommer's. Third world stuff. Crumbling walls.
Troubling aromas. As many vehicles with feet as wheels. Dirty looks
in my direction. But the boys are cheery. "Esme Bob," I tell them.
"Esmac?" Mohammed, Hamid, Mahmoud, another Mohammed. The five of us
duck and dodge our way through a street full of Tariks driving various
levels of horsepower.
Increasingly silent sign language from
curious boys, heard loudly even over the midday call to prayer: "I'm
ten. How old are you?" "Forty." (This surprises people in the
mideast, where I seem to look younger than that. But then, almost
everyone here smokes.) "What's the white gunk on your arms?"
"Sunscreen. My skin burns bad." "Do you like football?" "You
kidding? I love football." I add to this, out loud, my favorite team:
Arsenal. This is followed by the kids reciting the names of many
Arsenal players -- I guess they get the English Premier League in Egypt
-- followed by a group evaluation of their relative merit. Mostly we
grin and emulate soccer moves.
More questions. "What country
are you from?" A quick look around the neighborhood; saying "America"
right now doesn't seem like a good idea. With crosses and crescents
made by hand: "Are you a Muslim? Or a Christian?" Religion and
politics: awkward at a dinner table; bad when completely lost in a
mildly dodgy part of an unfamiliar third world city.
Fortunately,
crumbling debris intervenes, in the form of an abandoned Roman
aquaduct, broken long ago to make way for the road. I gasp at its
impressive slendor! and pull the digital camera from my bag.
Subject hereby changed.
The
taller of the two Mohammeds is particularly fascinated by the small
display screen. Soon, they call to another friend -- one I am later
informed by pantomime that they don't particularly like, partly because
he smokes -- and the five boys and I are all posing for pictures in
front of the broken aquaduct, laughing at the faces we make.
And
so that was the afternoon for a while. Walk walk walk. I buy them
soft drinks from a man standing silently in a small unventilated room
facing the road. "Do you smoke?" says a young hand. "La la la la la"
I say, frowning, feeling a need to be a good role model in thanks to a
father's trust of a sweaty, confused stranger.
Twenty minutes --
maybe half an hour, I dunno -- the Metro. The ringleader is pleased,
as if his position in the group is just a tiny bit more confirmed. We
shake hands. With the others, a few high fives, a couple of last
football evaluations. I shukran and masalaam them, quite sincerely,
suddenly wishing to have remained lost a little longer. And then I
turn and enter the station, waving goodbye.
The smaller Mohammed
-- the first boy, the one who approached when I was mapping and ducking
-- sneaks through the turnstyle and enthusiastically instructs me about
how to cross the tracks and operate the exit. I feign relief at the
further assistance. Finally satisfied with my delivery, he ducks back
under the turnstyle and disappears, catching up with the others.
I
climb the pedestrian overpass (which, thanks to small Mohammed, I have
just learned how to operate in the nick of time) and watch the boys go
home. Through that neighborhood.
I wonder what their homes look like. I am afraid that I already know.
And
I am happy and sad for this day, more than what feels right now like my
poor Tourist English can express. But if I was telling you this while
walking with you on a street somewhere, my hand would be over my heart.
I took a picture today that I will frame and keep on my wall.
It's not a picture of the pyramids.
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