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Actual Books
Who Hates Whom:
Well-Armed Fanatics,
Intractable Conflicts,
and Various Things Blowing Up
A Woefully Incomplete Guide™
“Revelatory... Harris's sly wit and infectious curiosity make understanding world chaos fascinating... witty, horrific, and necessary.”
-- Boston Globe
"Brave... irreverent... charges into the thick of the globe's myriad simmering wars... hilariously relaxed."
-- New York Observer
“Fascinating, enlightening, and surprisingly: NOT TOTALLY DEPRESSING.”
-- John Hodgman,
author, The Areas of My Expertise and correspondent for The Daily Show
"A rollicking ride of intellectual discovery and emotional growth... his comic timing never fails"
-- The Wall Street Journal
"A surprisingly touching memoir"
-- Entertainment Weekly
"Effortlessly funny and informative... tender, human, and very wise... A must for anyone who loves Jeopardy!, or has ever seen it, or is breathing."
-- Joss Whedon, creator, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
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Genuine:
This teenager was walking and giggling with a girlfriend when saw me taking snapshots outside the cricket ground in St. Vincent. Just goofing around, she playfully called out for me to take her picture, posing as a joke for a few seconds while I made her friend laugh again by calling her bluff.
Could this young girl possibly be lovelier? I cannot imagine how.
Not quite so genuine:
The model in the window display is not Jessica Simpson, even though it looks almost exactly like Jessica Simpson. No, it's Hilary Swank, an actress with two Oscars, and who is absolutely gorgeous in her own right, without trying to look like someone else. But for the cosmetics ad, she's made to look remarkably like Jessica Simpson, who didn't know that Chicken of the Sea isn't chicken.
So the ideal of beauty here isn't the model herself, but someone else entirely -- someone with incomparably less to offer, and whose face isn't even real in the first place. (Jessica Simpson's eyes, lips, and nose have all reportedly been surgically altered.) And then somehow an airbrushed photo of all that -- literally, a fake of a fake of a fake -- is supposed to be reason to believe that some fragrant goo in a jar will suddenly transform you in some beneficial way. Which of course, it can't. So that's fake, too.
That's weird enough as it is.
Then put all that in a store window here in Basseterre, the capital of a country which is maybe one percent northern European.
That's not beautiful. It's just...bizarre.
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