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  FAS
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Southern Queensland: Hits & Giggles |
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Tuesday, 10 January 2006 |
Notes on my first visit to southern coastal Queensland, aka Australia's Florida:
The comparison, incidentally, is explicit in many places here: just
down the road, on a long stretch of beach that hotel marketers have
long dubbed the Gold Coast, you can find a Miami and a Palm Springs and
at least a score of businesses which have taken Florida-themed names
for themselves.
The heart of the Gold Coast is a community lined with dozens of
sky-obliterating hotel and condo high-rises, where traffic on the main
drag is reminiscent of Highway A1A during rush hour. There are plenty
of beautiful people, and about as many people who were beautiful about
seventy years ago. Casinos and golf courses are going in; vestigal
traces of whatever was there before are going out. It's expensive,
it's crowded, and it's one of the least-natural-feeling places I've
seen on the east coast of Australia, which has dozens and dozens of
fabulous beaches.
This community is called, with a straight face, Surfers Paradise. And
it's booming. People love it. So go figure. Keep driving, and there
are also Florida-style amusement and water parks alongside a big
American-style freeway dotted with familiar fast food franchises at
every exit.
The transition from New South Wales to Queensland is more abrupt than
several international borders I've crossed. The Gold Coast and its
glitz begins right at the very edge of Queensland, literally the minute
you leave New South Wales, after a drive of about ten hours through
pacific Pacific resort towns mixed with long stretches of forest and
open farmland, punctuated by occasional spectacular examples of
1950s-America-style Giant Thing To Get You To Stop At A Particular
Tourist Trap Art, including 10-story windmills, golf balls, and even
bananas promising a view of the coastline.
I suspect the abruptness of the state border is actually part of why
almost every NSWer I've met has a negative impression of Queensland,
which is spoken of the way people in Los Angeles often generalize about
Texas. There are other reasons, too, as I've now had explained to me
by several friendly Queenslanders (whom I suspect do not
go by the nicko "Queenies," but I haven't asked). There's a bit more
religious right-wingitiness up here, and the econony and politics and
therefore the environment have historically been a bit more in the
hands of developers. Like I said: Florida.
But I only know what I'm told, and what I've been told has come from yet another bunch of mind-spinningly friendly people. That certainly hasn't changed.
I learned this last night, after I went to a cricket match at Woolloongabba.
Digressing for a second: I am endlessly impressed by the way
Australians manage dozens of six-syllable aboriginal place names which
seem interchangeable to the untrained ear. Highway
directions here are particularly fantastic. I have actually pretended to be lost twice now, just to enjoy the response, which
is usually something like "just keep going until you reach Wallawallabingbang, make a right onto Gabbagabbahey,
make sure you go
past Ramalamadingdong, and then take the first left at Inagaddadavida. If you see the Giant Prawn, you've gone too far."
So last night, I went to this cricket match, which was actually a
hyperspeed version of cricket called Twenty20. "Hyperspeed," of
course, applied to cricket, results in... a perfectly normal sporting
event. It takes about two and a half hours, the players bowl and hit the crap out of the ball, there are lots of cheers
and screams, and everyone goes home deliriously happy. Contrasted with traditional cricket tests, in which the 5-day weather forecast can actually play a hand in strategy, and it seems like entirely too much... oh, what's the word? ah, yes -- fun.
Thus the game has already acquired an affectionate nicko, "Hits & Giggles," just one letter removed from a similar phrase indicating pointlessness.
I cannot tell you how disturbing traditionalists seem to find this: "Cricket that only takes three hours? Are you mad, sir? Why, yes, children
might like it, and women and Americans, but it could corrupt the purity
of the gentlemen's batting strokes! This will not do. Now
be a good man, grasp my jodhpurs, and heft; I'm having difficulty
mounting my pennyfarthing ever since that Boer shot me in the
Transvaal."
Last night's match was the first international Twenty20 match ever held
on Australian soil. Sadly for men with handlebar mustaches, it attracted a massive overflow
sellout crowd of over 38,000 people, the largest cricket audience in
the history of Woolloongabba.
Obviously, this naive idea of spectator
sports as entertainment is clearly just a passing fad. And yet for some reason I am hoarse from cheering, and I suspect thousands of other people are, too. (Still, the sports sections of the newspapers this morning were filled with ponderous columns urging the cricket lords here not to give the public too much more of this thing it likes, which would obviously be very bad.)
So with the free city buses (yes, free, they do that here for big
events; you can also take a river bus thingy called the CityCat all the
way across town for about two bucks, and it's a gorgeous ride)
overwhelmed by the surprising crowd, I and thousands of
other Twenty20 fans decided simply to walk the few kilometers back into
downtown,
despite the late hour and Eighty80 (temperature and humidity)
weather.
You'd think that heat, fatigue, and alcohol might make such an
unexpected
march unpleasant. Nope. Instead, I was quickly gang-befriended by a
small clot of cricket-hyped guys who invited me to break the hike by
joining them for a few beers. Next thing you know, I'm in a comfy
tavern under a bridge on the river, learning from an engineer who has
studied the issue how the weather here affects brewing chemistry.
I literally cannot walk down the street here without making new and interesting friends.
It's not perfect, of course. There are growing environmental problems,
and Oz doesn't recycle nearly enough, and a lot of aborigines are still
in a fix, and Brisbane is entirely too hot to support human life, which I
forgot to mention. (It certainly seems true. If you plan on
visiting Queensland during the summer, first make sure you are a
reptile. I cannot urge this strongly enough.)
Also, there are sharks, and sometimes they eat people. If you are even
vaguely familiar with 1970s Spielberg, you'll need me to promise this
is true: a pretty young girl was just munched out at a place called
Amity Point. Now -- again, I swear -- there are men out looking for
the shark that did this.
(Memo to the captain: whatever you do, do not let the shark bite the boat.
If you still feel you must, at least make sure you have an oxygen tank
and a flare gun handy beforehand. Not after. Trust me.)
Still, I could spend the rest of my life quite happily in Brisbane. Seriously.
Especially if I wake up tomorrow as a born-again reptile who enjoys
driving in heavy traffic. Not saying that's required. It's pretty
damn nice here anyway. Just saying. It would definitely put Brisbane
right over the top.
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Loan a Few Bucks, Change a Few Lives
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