As a piece of writing, Alex Trebek's memoir goes down easy

Slate

"Trebek does not pretend the book is a narrative masterwork or an excavation of his psyche," says Ruth Graham of the Jeopardy! host's new book The Answer Is: Reflections on My Life. Graham adds: "But for all its breeziness, the memoir does the work of fleshing out a character with whom millions of Americans have spent their evenings since the 1980s. Trebek was raised in a working-class home in Ontario; his Ukrainian immigrant father worked as a hotel chef. Trebek writes of helping his dad make wedding cakes at the Nickel Range Hotel, a popular hotel in the mining town of Sudbury. It was little Alex’s job to collect empty Kodak Brownie film spools that he frosted to serve as cylindrical supports for the cake’s upper layers. After a peripatetic school career, he ended up as a broadcaster with the CBC, and then moved to L.A. for a gig hosting a game show called The Wizard of Odds. Jeopardy! launched in its current iteration in 1984 and has been on the air ever since."

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