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Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade In Jeopardy!
By Bob Harris

My perpetual quest to make it onto Jeopardy! continues apace, and leads me down more and more oblique paths. For instance, this book, a combination "peek behind the curtain/mental travelogue" offered by one of the show's five-time champions.

In Prisoner of Trebekistan, author Harris relates his odyssey to, onto, and through the show, from growing up in Cleveland's suburbs to failing the tryout exam to his ultimate success, failure, and successful failure on the game itself. His breezy narrative is chock full of minor insights about the show, a lot of Harris's insights into himself (gleaned via his time preparing for and appearing on the show itself), and plenty of humor. The humor goes a long way towards making the book as appealing as it is. It also helps that Harris, once a stand-up comic, is funny. Not Aziz Ansari funny, but...

A big upside to Prisoner of Trebekistan, in this reader's eyes: if you want to go on Jeopardy!, you can get some good lowdown on what it takes to get there, and what it takes to win once you get on. It's both encouraging and discouraging, almost depending upon what page you're reading. But that's no criticism of the author; Harris is just giving us the goods, and it's up to the reader to figure out where to go with it.

The biggest weakness of this book comes from Harris's personal ruminations about life, the universe, and everything, as seen through the prism of his Jeopardy! experiences. A lot of what Harris describes in his book concerns some intensely personal--almost singularly personal--thoughts about how his wins and losses on the show have changed his life and outlook. The problem with intensely personal, idiosyncratic ideas is that they are--wait for it--intensely personal and idiosyncratic, and thus somewhat less accessible to those who have not had that experience themselves. Like, for instance, the vast majority of Harris's readers. Whether that's a flaw in the author's work, or in ourselves, is perhaps best left to the individual reader's judgment. For this reader, it must be said, some of the author's views and experiences (particularly the stuff relating to his family), while touching and obviously heartfelt, fail to connect, especially when the reader has his own narcissistic interest in learning about a certain quiz show.

But again, it's not necessarily the author's fault that his focus is not as tight as mine. Laying that one debate aside, then, one has to conclude that Prisoner of Trebekistan should be counted among Bob Harris's bigger wins.