Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy!

When he initially tried the audition test to become a panelist on the quiz show _Jeopardy!_, Bob Harris flunked out. He subsequently flunked it four more times. It would seem that something inside him knew that becoming a champion player was his destiny, because he kept on trying until he qualified. Eventually getting accepted into the game, and winning, and losing, has made him what he is today, which includes being the author of the funny and surprisingly touching memoir _Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy!_ (Crown Publishers). It may seem that a life largely spent working hard to be good at a television game show would necessarily be superficial or inconsequential, but despite all the jokes in this account, Harris learned some wisdom worthy of the sages, and much of it was on a higher plane than "What is the capital of Thailand?" Readers might pick up some trivia, and will certainly have some laughs, but more importantly, will absorb an account by someone who learned some truly important life lessons. The worst advice he got after his failures to qualify for an initial show was the reassurance from the people administering the tests he flunked: "After all, they would always insist, it's _impossible_ to study for _Jeopardy!_" Much of the initial part of Harris's book is spent showing just how untrue this is. All the other champions he met had their own training regimens, too. It would seem that an account of training for such an event might make boring reading, but not only are the techniques Harris used interesting in themselves, but they have surprisingly larger meanings, not the least of which is that any ordinary person can absorb as much arcane information as time and energy allow. A good deal of the preparation was spent in mnemonic techniques which memory experts have coached us to use ever since such experts existed. There are plenty of silly sentences to remember the biologist's hierarchy of kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species, but Harris explains it is good to come up with your own as part of being involved in the creativity of memory (his was "King Philip Glass Orders his Family a Generous Special"). Harris summarizes the lessons in his preparation in a list he calls "The Eightfold Path to Enlightened Jeopardy", which actually has nine steps, and the last one is a reminder to relax and let such contradictions go. Following these steps, he enriched his own life in wonderful ways just by _Jeopardy!_ His gratitude and humility shine throughout his earnest book. _Jeopardy!_ is always going to be part of his life. Harris probably will forever be asked "Hey, what's the capital of Libya?", since most who know him know he is a five-time Jeopardy! winner. He also has made good friends with other contestants. They share his obsession with cramming in more knowledge, of course, but have plenty of admirable qualities besides: "These were just hardworking people with great curiosity, all willing

This is an odd, moving, funny, troubling, and hugely ambitious book. Yes, it is true that it describes some subtleties of how to succeed on Jeopardy; yes, presumably that makes it required reading for anyone who plans to compete on that show. But to call it a "how-to" book ignores how much you have to learn to succeed on that particular show. So I'd even go further. This book teaches truly useful memory techniques which should be useful to anyone who needs to memorize -- uh -- well, pretty much anything. The works of E. M. Forrester, for example, permanently seared into your brain by a visual image that concludes with the Taj Mahal in a somewhat unusual location. This would be a good book for students, particularly high-school students, say, inflicted with a history teacher who demands rote memorization of history without inspiring a desire to learn it. But to call this an educational how-to book is to cheapen it greatly. This is a very amusing book, playful and witty. Actually, at times it is laugh-out-loud funny. Mr. Harris has a dry, self-deprecating wit punctuated with occasional flashes of buttocks. But to call this an educational how-to comedy is to shortchange it. This is an exciting book. Mr. Harris somehow manages to make Jeopardy games matter. He gives them the adrenal pulse of a real competition; he makes us suffer as he falls behind and rejoice when he takes the lead. It shows us the fierce preparation required to succeed, an almost compulsive focus on study and practice worthy of a professional athlete. Ok, so Jeopardy will never supplant football on the world stage, but after reading this book you'll understand why it's been on the air for forty years. But to call it an exciting educational comic how-to drama is to ignore the real, underlying themes. At core, under it all, this is a very human book, recounted by a humble, observant, caring man. This is a tale of a real personal journey, of a man awakening from the opiatic haze of rudderless America to a higher, more personally satisfying realm; of loss, and love, and friendship; of achievement, of competition, of success, of failure, and in the end of self-acceptance. This is an odd, moving, funny, troubling, and hugely ambitious book. This book is a little bit wise, and a little bit muddled; a little bit sad, and a whole lot joyful. But most of all, this book is worth reading.

This is a terrific book. It looks like it's about Jeopardy and it says it's about Jeopardy and it's called Prisoner of Trebekistan but guess what? It's actually about finding out how to do something really hard that you really don't know how to do. And how that changes your life forever. You learn how to study for Jeopardy--or anything, really--so for that alone, it's worth having. I taught college English for ten years, which is why I think all college freshmen ought to have this book. It teaches you how to learn and it shows you that the point of learning is the way that new knowledge enlarges your world and changes you, not the knowledge itself. Don't you wish you'd known that when you were eighteen? I wish I'd known that this clearly last week. It's a very funny memoir with a plot, or several, and high stakes: the author's entire life. It's a story about figuring things out. It's about failure. Repeated, abject, public failure. It's about how new knowledge changes the things you see every day. It makes you burst out laughing and frighten the cat. It's a page-turner you can't put down, especially if, like me, you have never followed Jeopardy and you don't know what happens in the end. Even if you do know how it comes out, you'll be completely fascinated by this look behind the scenes of the show. And, in the course of the book, the author outlines the Eightfold Path to Enlightened Jeopardy, which turns out accidentally to be a wise and funny guide to a happier and weirder and far more interesting life. That's pretty impressive. My favorite part is how the author learned more and more and more arcane and far-flung facts to play Jeopardy and how that completely changed the world for him. I've never seen a more convincing argument for learning everything you possibly can. You get out of your own skull, outside your limited experience, and discover how much more interesting and complex and wonderful the world is. You get to the end of the book so excited that you want to jump out of your chair, call all your friends, hug everyone, quit wasting time, and go see the whole world--you want to do every important thing right now! What a terrific book!

Who knew that the hilarious Bob Harris is also an eloquent writer? His Prisoner will have you laughing out loud while you are being brilliantly informed about all things Jeopardy (and a few things about life) -- from how the game is played by the experts to what it is really like to be on that stage. Bob's personal asides leave you convinced that if everyone had his amiable zest for life the world would be a much better place. It also occurs to me that when Mr Trebek delivers his last Final Jeopardy question he should hand the baton over to Bob. Now THAT would be something to see.