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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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