Customer Reviews

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

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"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.

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.

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.

Bob explains everything, fairly and honestly, probably getting something wrong or not to your political taste, but not for lack of trying to get it right, considering, you know, he's a gameshow contestant. And he's funny. Which is saying something, considering most of the time he's describing genocide.

Even better, just like in his memoir Prisoner of Trebekistan (which you should read if you haven't), you get to the end, and somehow, this wise-guy know-it-all ends up sneaking past you and becoming very moving and wise. Go figure.

Just as he did with Trebekistan, where he gave the skinny on the world of "Jeopardy," Bob Harris has delivered another long overdue book, this time in the form of a guide to modern human hostilities. Who Hates Whom, sadly, will come in handy more often than you can guess. Just keep it on your coffee table permanently, so when the evening news comes on, you can really understand what they're talking about. Just last night I watched the situation in Myanmar blow up and went to pages 101-105. Next was an escalation in Darfur - pages 64-68. At this rate, the book will be worn out in a week.

I think it is something of a miracle that Mr. Harris made this book so accessible. I picked up this book because I enjoyed other material that Bob Harris produced, but I was a little wary about this book. After all, he's writing about many of the "b-side" wars in countries that don't make the 7 o'clock news. The sources of these conflicts range from leftover Cold War proxy wars to colonization to ancient struggles when men in bearskins beat each other with femurs. That is a lot of material to cover in a tiny book and simplifying or omitting the histories can prevent readers from gaining any real knowledge of what is going on. Mr. Harris avoided this problem by avoiding lengthy histories and, while acknowledging the roots of the conflicts he describes, largely focusing on the contemporary "things blowing up." There are usually short blurbs about the history of the conflict and then a look at the modern state of the conflict and the parties involved. Generally, these are pretty good. In the interest of not getting himself killed Mr. Harris seems to play a fairly neutral party when examining the various size wars. The sole except is when he gave into his personal rage about the invasion of Iraq. I took the review down to 4 stars just because he left out the Armenia-Azerbaijan/Nagorno-Karabakh war. Sure, things have settled down there, Mr. Harris, but no peace agreement has been reached. And how can you overlook the history of that war - at one point both sides paid the Russians to fight for them and a Russian Air wing ended up fighting a Russian Tank column. That's comedy gold, in a really dark way.

Bob Harris manages to educate and entertain in this guide to the myriad of wars, conflicts, arguments, rivalries, and turf battles around the world. As advertised, he tells you who hates whom around the globe. We actually keep this book on the coffee table as a quick reference source for those times the news mentions an unfamiliar regional fracas or historical bone of contention in a far away land. The book does manage to educate the reader on history while providing some laugh out loud observations about the absurdity of all the strife. And, somehow, Harris manages to make one feel somewhat optimistic about the future of us all.

This book is a must read for any curious, concerned human being living anywhere. I would particulary urge any and all highschool students to pick up this book. Harris has essentially written a 101 primer on dozens of wars all over the world, done in a highly readable, comedic way. The most fun I've probably ever had reading about awful things. I'm not quite sure how, but the writer has a way of making even complex, depressing material seem simple and accessible.

I bought Bob Harris's previous book, Prisoner of Trebekistan, because I'm a big fan of "Jeopardy," but he showed both a knack for self-deprecation of Dangerfield-esque levels and insight into America's favorite quiz show. Now, Bob takes a completely different tack, hoping to give America a glimpse into wars that most Americans were completely unaware of, or failed to care about. If you want to get informed about world events and learn not only who hates whom, but why, I strongly recommend this book.

In this book, Bob Harris manages to combine very serious (and potentially depressing) information with a lovely, funny writing style. In any other format, the events detailed in this book would be enough to make you cry, but the author pulls a laugh out at all the right places to make the content bearable. Harris has also done all the illustrations, maps, and photography for the book, and these additions add a lot.

I would particularly recommend this book for high school or college students, who will be tasked in the not-too-distant future with dealing with the conflicts, wars, and disputes Harris has described. Lots of people have screwed up large parts of the world, kids, and you'll have to learn how deep the hole's been dug before you can help the world start climbing out. In this book, you'll get a good start while still enjoying the read.

The conclusion, however, is perhaps one of the most valuable parts because Harris brings the contents together and tries to give the reader some perspective. This is just one more thing that separates Who Hates Whom from your average scholarly volume about global conflict- Harris can't help inserting a discussion of the moral and ethical implications for us, the people/nations on the sidelines of these conflicts. This personal, human touch gives the reader a sense of both hope and responsibility.