Who Hates Whom: Well-Armed Fanatics, Intractable Conflicts, and Various Things Blowing Up A Woefully Incomplete Guide [Paperback]

Bob Harris (Author)

Book Description

Release date: September 25, 2007

The daily news gives you events but rarely context. So what do al-Qaeda, North Korea, and Iran really want? Which faction is which in Iraq and who’s arming whom? What’s the deal with Somalia, Darfur, and Kashmir? Fatah, Hamas, and Hezbollah?

Finally, here’s Who Hates Whom—a handy, often stunning guide to the world’s recent conflicts, from the large and important to the completely absurd.

• Which countries are fighting over an uninhabitable glacier with no real strategic value—at an annual cost of half a billion dollars?
• Which underreported war has been the deadliest since World War II—worse even than Vietnam—with a continuing aftermath worse than most current conflicts combined?
• Which royal family members were respected as gods—until the crown prince machine-gunned the king and queen?
• Which country’s high school students think the Nazis had a “good side”? Which nation’s readers recently put Mein Kampf on the bestseller list? And which other country watches itself with four million security cameras? (Hint: All three are U.S. allies.)

Detailed with more than fifty original maps, photographs, and illustrations, Who Hates Whom summarizes more than thirty global hotspots with concise essays, eye-catching diagrams, and (where possible) glimmers of kindness and hope.

In which bodies of water can you find most of the world’s active pirates? Which dictatorship is bulldozing its own villages? Where exactly are Waziristan, Bangsamoro, Kurdistan, Ituri, Baluchistan, and Jubaland—and how will they affect your life and security? Find out in Who Hates Whom, a seriously amusing look at global humanity—and the lack thereof.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“The geopolitical equivalent of scorecards that get hawked at ball games. Only Bob could make a user’s guide to our increasingly hostile world this absorbing, this breezy, and—ultimately—this hopeful.”

—Ken Jennings, author of Brainiac

“It takes deft touch to combine this much-needed research with a razor-sharp wit... You’ll laugh ‘til you cry, but at least you’ll be one step ahead of CNN.”

—Gus Russo, author of Supermob and The Outfit

“If you read one book this year, be like me and choose this one.”
—Emo Philips

“Bob Harris, perpetual Jeopardy underdog, now turns his polymathic curiosity to the subject of GLOBAL CONFLICT—the result: this handy history of violence that is at once surprising, fascinating, enlightening, and surprisingly: NOT TOTALLY DEPRESSING. A gimlet-eyed look at the world we endure that’s also suitable for enjoying with a gimlet.”
— John Hodgman, author of The Areas of My Expertise and correspondent for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

About the Author

BOB HARRIS is the author of Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy!, and has written for media ranging from National Lampoon to the television show CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. He lives in Los Angeles.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Three Rivers Press; 1 edition (September 25, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307394360
• ISBN-13: 978-0307394361
• Product Dimensions: 0.6 x 5.2 x 7.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #555,457 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 33 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Joking Guide to Murderous Folly September 26, 2007

By R. Hardy HALL OF FAMETOP 500 REVIEWER

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

"You can't tell the players without a program!" Thus shout the program sellers to the crowd entering the baseball stadium. If your eye is not on the small-stadium game, but rather on the biggest stadium of all, the globe and its international power plays, you can't tell the players without _Who Hates Whom: Well-Armed Fanatics, Intractable Conflicts, and Various Things Blowing Up: A Woefully Incomplete Guide_ (Three Rivers Press) by Bob Harris. This is an exceedingly useful book, consisting of many three or four page chapters devoted to hot spots around the world, each chapter with a map, a summary of who the players are on both sides (if the conflict is limited to two sides, but many are far messier), the history of how they got into the current mess (a history going back millennia at times), and prospects for the future. The topic is vital, but it is bloody and can provoke a disgust with one's fellow humans. Harris, however, won't let the violence get in the way of getting his points across in a jaunty, humorous vein. He has, after all, been a comic, and he reminds us that his degree is in electrical engineering, and also he has been "... a TV writer, a memoirist, a TV debunker of urban legends, and the voice of a cartoon penguin, all of which qualifies me for squat." He is a big time winner at _Jeopardy!_ (chronicled in his entertaining _Prisoner of Trebekistan_), so he has a broad realm of knowledge, and he is also a world traveler. You won't get a comprehensive picture of any of these conflicts here, but that's not the book's purpose. "This book is meant to be handy when you see something explode on CNN but they switch to Anna Nicole Smith still being dead before you're sure what went kaboom." (Her death was on a big news day; more than once Harris refers to some important international event of that day being buried in bulletins about our tragic loss.)

Throughout a book of outrageous, murderous behavior on one side and another (he warns us not to look for good guys), Harris remains a genial and witty guide. The humor is a way of detachment, of course, but also there just isn't any better outlet for outrage. In examining the philosophy of the Taliban, he writes that their ideas come from an Egyptian, Sayyid Qutb, "whose writings from prison in the 1950s and 1960s are like a bizarro _Letters from a Birmingham Jail_, replacing Dr. King's nonviolence and compassion with a violent contempt for most of humanity." He refers to the 2006 Festival of Holocaust Denial, in which the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "invited the world's leading crackpots for a shindig of wrongitude." In Thailand, the former Siam, _The King and I_ is banned "as false and insulting to the royal family. Even discussing the subject is frowned upon. While visiting, whenever you feel afraid, do _not_ whistle a happy tune." But the current Thai king is much beloved because, for one thing, "the guy's a jazz musician who puts his mp3s online." Kalimantan, the Indonesian state, "is the opposite of Java - so densely forested that some chunks remain completely unexplored, although international timber and mining companies are doing their best to give us a view." When a dictator in Turkmenistan dropped dead, "he was replaced in a rigged election by his former dentist, whose name in English contains more than half of our alphabet, including every vowel. (Really.)" Reflecting on the ephemerality of his own book, and the horrid conditions in Somalia, Harris writes, "Sadly, I cannot imagine things will have quieted much when you read this. Even if you've just found a dog-eared copy that your dad used to own."

Harris has not included a chapter on the United States "since this edition is mostly for U.S. readers, and you already know whom you've recently hated and feared." American influence is all over, though, often baleful leftovers from the era when any oppressive dictator could count on our financial aid if he just assured us he was anticommunist. In many current conflicts, our interest in making money is making humanitarian goals less achievable. There may be implicit and explicit criticism of U.S. policy here, but Harris knows there is much to admire: "... for all its faults, the U.S. is history's best example of a country where people from literally the entire planet manage to live in peace, all at once." He says that researching this book has given him more hope for humanity, reminding us that 150 years ago the U.S. practiced slavery, colonialism was the standard way of doing things, and women could not vote anywhere on the planet. He asks us to remember that there are a few places on the globe you'd never consider visiting because it is just too dangerous, but they are relatively few. "Every city has its bad neighborhoods; that doesn't mean you can't love living there. Same with Earth: except for some specific dicey bits, most of our planet is still full of wonderful surprises." Despite all the madness, this is a hopeful book, and also a useful one, and also an entertaining one.

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Finally, Someone Makes It Clear September 28, 2007

By Lucas Gerhart

Format:Paperback

This is the kind of book that's been needed for a long time. It's a quick, surprisingly funny guide to all those things on the news that you know you ought to know about but don't. You get the history of the conflicts in a given area, who the main players are, and what they're fighting about. Suddenly, things get a lot clearer.

It's not a book you feel like you need to read cover-to-cover, either, although you might find yourself doing that anyway, getting pulled along by the humor. Instead, you can use it as a quick reference the next time you find yourself wondering about what the deal is in Burma, for example. You're going to want to keep it next to your television or newspaper.

The maps are great too. I found that a lot of times I got a sense of what the main thrust of a conflict was just by looking at the map. Harris has done a good job -- in the maps and in the text -- with boiling things down to the essential points, so you can see the situation for yourself.

The book is more than a painless way to educate yourself -- it's a funny way to educate yourself.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars good for your brain and/or soul October 6, 2007

By Tim Johnson

Format:Paperback

Despite what we're constantly told, we don't live in the Age of Information. We live in the Age of Crappy, Useless Information. TV continuously shows us pictures of things blowing up all over the world. But they never provide any context, so you end up with the impression Planet Earth is simultaneously boring, confusing and extremely dangerous.

That's why "Who Hates Whom" is such a wonderful and useful book. Read it, and suddenly the uprising in Burma (now all over TV) isn't just a morass of random violence, but the next chapter in an ongoing drama that ACTUALLY MAKES SENSE. Suddenly the NY Times story today (October 7, 2007) about mass rape in Congo isn't just about hideous human depravity springing out at us from nowhere, but hideous human depravity that grows out of a 130 year-long history of extreme violence. Likewise with Iraq, Colombia, Kashmir, and 28 other chapters.

Of course, this much horrible information in one place would normally be unbearably depressing. But Bob Harris is such a clear, succinct, hilarious writer the whole thing is, amazingly enough, a genuine pleasure to read. You will never laugh more about worldwide human suffering. (Or rather, about the universal human behaviors that lead to worldwide suffering -- Harris' humanity and decency come through more clearly in 200 short pages than the World Bank can manage in 10,000 stultifying reports.) And he closes with a believable case for why everything you've just read should actually make you optimistic about human potential. Maybe.

So get this for yourself, and for anyone you know with the least interest in the outside world. Your brains and souls will thank you.