Of natural interest to Jeopardy! buffs, but solid entertainment as well for readers who don’t tune in.
The category is books by former champion players of the long-running game show Jeopardy! This entry may be the most astute yet under that growing rubric.
Just a month behind Braniac (2006), a sizable lesson in trivia by big winner Ken Jennings, this cleverly executed volume displays the obligatory acumen and erudition, as well as considerable wit and writing ability. After all, Harris has been a stand-up comic, a radio humorist and a TV crime-show writer. His text reports on how he won, lost and played the game a decade ago. Harris did frequent finger exercises, the better to hit the buzzer like a Jedi. He assiduously studied reference works jammed into apartments shared with supportive girlfriends. He memorized state flowers and national capitals, obscure body parts and foreign film directors, vice-presidents of the US and read the novels of E.M. Forster. He explored geographical mysteries and brushed up on his Shakespeare. He became a five-time winner (the limit at the time) and went on to play other champions at several tournaments. Harris dramatically sets forth each game, complete with detailed green-room byplay and views from the contestant’s lectern. It’s the epic tale: Appearing on Jeopardy! was a defining moment in the author’s life. Yet here, he goes beyond backstage information and tips on mnemonics to build a substantive memoir of family and growth. It’s about love and a burgeoning devotion to history and science, to fun and facts and connections. For his next report, we look forward to his departure from Trebekistan.
Of natural interest to Jeopardy! buffs, but solid entertainment as well for readers who don’t tune in.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-33956-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
