Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy! [Hardcover]

Bob Harris (Author)

Book Description

Release date: September 5, 2006

A.: This is the story of a working-class guy from Ohio with little real knowledge of Ambidextrous Presidents, Things Made from Rubber, and hundreds of other categories, but who nonetheless plunges so far into cramming for Jeopardy! that it changes his relationships, bends his worldview, and literally leads him to the ends of the earth, trying to understand it all.

Q.: What is Prisoner of Trebekistan?

Welcome to a world where obscure information is crucial to survival, vast sums of cash are at stake, and milliseconds can change not just a game but the course of your entire life. (Plus, you could win two Camaros and enough Bon Ami cleanser to scrub a small nation.)

Prisoner of Trebekistan is Bob Harris’s hilarious, insightful account of one man’s unlikely epic journey through Jeopardy!, gleefully exploring triumph and failure, the nature of memory, and how knowledge itself can transform you in unpredictable ways—all against the backdrop of the most popular quiz show in history.

In Prisoner of Trebekistan, Bob chronicles his transformation from a struggling stand-up comic who repeatedly fails the Jeopardy! audition test into an elite player competing against the show’s most powerful brains. To get there, he embarks on a series of intense study sessions, using his sense of humor to transform conventional memory skills into a refreshingly playful approach to learning that’s as amusing as it is powerful.

What follows is not only a captivating series of high-stakes wins and losses on Jeopardy!, but also a growing appreciation of a borderless world that Bob calls Trebekistan, where a love of learning reigns and the smarter you get the more you realize how much you don’t yet know.

Filled with secrets that only a veteran contestant could share—from counterintuitive game strategies to Jedi-like tactics with the Jeopardy! signaling device—Prisoner of Trebekistan also gives you the chance to play along with the actual clues that led to victory or defeat in high-level tournaments, plus candid, moving reflections on how the games affected Bob’s offstage life—and vice versa.

Not only an irresistible treat for Jeopardy! fans, Prisoner of Trebekistan is a delight for anyone who loves a rollicking tale that celebrates the unpredictability of life and the sneaky way it has of teaching us the things that really matter.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this eccentric, energetic and engaging memoir of his long run on America's favorite television quiz show, Harris, a former standup comedian and current comedy writer, gives readers the lowdown on life as "one of the show's big winners—and big losers." He promises to tell all, and he does, from the show's beginning in 1963 to his own blow-by-blow experiences as a contestant. He discusses his growing obsession with winning, how it cost him a girlfriend and how he luckily found another. For those who would follow in his footsteps, he is generous with tips on strategy: buzzer skills, how to predict topics (keep holidays in mind), how to suss out a Daily Double, which clues to tackle first, how to one-up your competition (though one of the gems of this often charming book is the account of the quite sincere friendships that grew among the top competitors). Like many a standup routine, his narrative zigs and zags back and forth in time and topic, but like the best of routines, it is sharply timed, pulling out many swerves and surprises to keep the reader alert. And what is Alex Trebek really like? "I dunno," says Harris, but the Trebek we meet is highly professional and unfailingly courteous. "Just like on TV." (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Although reality shows and other mindless drivel seem to dominate the TV landscape, it's reassuring that Jeopardy! still remains as a last vestige of academic pursuit in a sea of pop culture. This book provides a behind-the-scenes look at this holy grail of trivia contests. Harris, who won five games in a row (the limit in 1998), was invited back several more times to participate in Tournament of Champions competitions. Far from being a scholar, Harris recounts how he used whimsical mnemonics and his Eightfold Path of Enlightened Jeopardy to win over seemingly superior competition. Harris' account is a personal story and manages to cram in enough fun facts to keep any trivia nut happy. David Siegfried
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Crown; First Edition edition (September 5, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307339564
• ISBN-13: 978-0307339560
• Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 1.3 x 9.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (56 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #86,503 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #100 in Books > Humor & Entertainment > Puzzles & Games > Trivia

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

63 of 67 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Move over, Dave Eggers September 24, 2006

By dondo

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

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.

28 of 29 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars What Is A Great Book About _Jeopardy!_ And About Life? October 2, 2006

By R. Hardy HALL OF FAMETOP 500 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover

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 to try interesting things. One of which was _Jeopardy!_" Harris delights in the creativity and sense of community he found among them, and in the stratospheric championship rounds, they all seemed to be friendly competitors, cheering each other on and acknowledging that there was little difference between themselves, the games being decided by an arbitrary "one clue here, a Daily Double there, one lucky category, a millisecond of a blink on the buzzer." He won prizes, but he won friendships, and indirectly his efforts led to his fruitful relationship with his current and long-time paramour and best friend. _Prisoner of Trebekistan_ can be read as a manual for _Jeopardy!_ players, or as a jocular but heartfelt memoir, but there is no denying that there is deeper and delightful wisdom in its pages.

30 of 32 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars It's not what you think..... September 7, 2006

By Bill O'Donnell

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

As a former "Jeopardy!" and "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" contestant, I was expecting Prisoner of Trebekistan to be a funny book about the whole Jeopardy! experience. It's not.

It's funny alright, and it will be of great help if you are preparing for one of these shows, or want to vicariously live the life of a game show contestant, or improve your memory, but that's not what this book is about. It's about life, the joy of living every day and the great joy that the pursuit of knowledge can add to every moment, every experience.

Even if you think game shows are inane and a waste of time, you'll still enjoy this book as it takes a much meandering route through the life of a stand-up comic, humor writer, internet blogger, radio personality turned 13 time Jeopardy player, who has a surprisingly down to earth and just plain nice philosophy of life.

So - it's a philosophy book that gets to profound universal truths via giant buttocks and pudus running up logs. And a darn good one at that, don't miss it.