I’m not expecting many reviews of Who Hates Whom, since it’s just a small impulse-buy paperback, but I’ve just learned the New York Observer will have a kind review in Monday’s issue. Here’s a chunk:
Bob Harris is a brave man. Armed only with his irreverent sense of humor, boldly declaring his lack of expertise, he charges into the thick of the globe’s myriad simmering wars, coolly cataloguing the gripes of each antagonistic sect and faction. The result, Who Hates Whom—Well-Armed Fanatics, Intractable Conflicts, and Various Things Blowing Up: A Woefully Incomplete Guide (Three Rivers Press, $11.95), is hilariously relaxed about all the hate out there. See, for example, his remarks on the 2006 Tehran conference on the Holocaust: “Mahmoud Ahmadinejad invited the world’s leading crackpots for a shindig of wrongitude…"For the record, that first sentence makes me uncomfortable, but I’m including it so I can also make the following point:
I am most assuredly not brave, and neither is Who Hates Whom. Not even close. Like way so very not.
Bravery would be writing a book like Who Hates Whom in about two-thirds of the countries it mentions.