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Harvard Book Store

Harvard Book Store is an independently run bookstore serving the greater Cambridge area. The bookstore is located in Harvard Square and has been family-owned since 1932. We are known for our extraordinary selection of new, used and remaindered books and for a history of innovation. In 2009, we introduced same-day "green delivery" and a book-making robot capable of printing and binding any of millions of titles in minutes. Find out more about us at www.harvard.com.

http://www.harvard.com

Gary Shteyngart: Little Failure, A Memoir

Thu, Jan 23, 2014

"Harvard Book Store and the Harvard Advocate are pleased to welcome back the bestselling author of Super Sad True Love Story, Gary Shteyngart, for a reading and discussion of his memoir, Little Failure. After three acclaimed novels, Gary Shteyngart turns to memoir in a candid, witty, deeply poignant account of his life so far. Shteyngart shares his American immigrant experience, moving back and forth through time and memory with self-deprecating humor, moving insights, and literary bravado. The result is a resonant story of family and belonging that feels epic and intimate and distinctly his own. Provocative, hilarious, and inventive, Little Failure reveals a deeper vein of emotion in Gary Shteyngart's prose. It is a memoir of an immigrant family coming to America, as told by a lifelong misfit who forged from his imagination an essential literary voice and, against all odds, a place in the world."

Forum Network

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Harvard Book Store
Scott Stossel: My Age of Anxiety - Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind

Thu, Jan 30, 2014

Harvard Book Store is pleased to welcome the editor of The Atlantic, Scott Stossel and editor at large for Vanity Fair, Cullen Murphy for a discussion of Stossel's latest work, My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind. A riveting, revelatory, and moving account of the author's struggles with anxiety, and of the history of efforts by scientists, philosophers, and writers to understand the condition As recently as thirty-five years ago, anxiety did not exist as a diagnostic category. Today, it is the most common form of officially classified mental illness. Scott Stossel gracefully guides us across the terrain of an affliction that is pervasive yet too often misunderstood.

Mental Health Month

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Harvard Book Store
Alex Myers: Revolutionary

Fri, Jan 31, 2014

Harvard Book Store is pleased to welcome teacher, activist, and Harvard alum Alex Myers, the first openly transgender student at Harvard University, for a discussion of his novel Revolutionary. In 1782, during the final clashes of the Revolutionary War, one of our young nation's most valiant and beloved soldiers was, secretly, a woman. When Deborah Samson disguised herself as a man and joined the Continental Army, she wasn't just fighting for America's independence'she was fighting for her own.

Forum Network

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Harvard Book Store
Erik Brynjolfsson & Andrew McAfee: The Second Machine Age

Thu, Feb 6, 2014

"Harvard Book Store is pleased to welcome the director of the MIT Center for Digital Business, Erik Brynjolfsson, and Andrew McAfee, one of the principal research scientists at the Center, for a discussion of their book, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. The authors were joined in conversation by Meghna Chakrabarti, co-host of WBUR's Radio Boston. In The Second Machine Age MIT's Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee'two thinkers at the forefront of their field'reveal the forces driving the reinvention of our lives and our economy. As the full impact of digital technologies is felt, we will realize immense bounty in the form of dazzling personal technology, advanced infrastructure, and near-boundless access to the cultural items that enrich our lives."

Forum Network

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Harvard Book Store
Jennifer Senior: All Joy And No Fun - The Paradox of Modern Parenthood

Fri, Feb 7, 2014

"Thousands of books have examined the effects of parents on their children. In All Joy and No Fun, award-winning journalist Jennifer Senior now asks: what are the effects of childrenon their parents? In All Joy and No Fun, award-winning journalist Jennifer Senior tries to tackle this question, isolating and analyzing the many ways in which children reshape their parents' lives, whether it's their marriages, their jobs, their habits, their hobbies, their friendships, or their internal senses of self. She argues that changes in the last half century have radically altered the roles of today's mothers and fathers, making their mandates at once more complex and far less clear."

Forum Network

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Harvard Book Store
Salaam, Love: American Muslim Men on Love, Sex, and Intimacy

Tue, Feb 11, 2014

"Harvard Book Store is pleased to welcome Ayesha Mattu and Nura Maznavi, editors of Love, InshAllah: The Secret Love Lives of American Muslim Women, along with four of their contributors: Ahmed Akbar, Dan I. Oversaw, Mohammed Samir Shamma, and Sam Pierstorff for a discussion of Mattu's and Maznavi's latest work, Salaam, Love: American Muslim Men on Love, Sex, and Intimacy. From the editors of the groundbreaking anthology Love, InshAllah comes a provocative new exploration of the most intimate parts of Muslim men's lives. By raising their voices to share stories of love and heartbreak, loyalty and betrayal, intimacy and insecurity, these Muslim men are leading the way for all men to recognize that being open and honest about their feelings is not only okay'it's intimately connected to their lives and critical to their happiness and well-being."

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Harvard Book Store
Lawrence Buell: The Dream Of The Great American Novel

Thu, Feb 20, 2014

"Harvard Book Store is pleased to welcome Lawrence Buell, Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature at Harvard University, for a discussion of his book The Dream of the Great American Novel. The idea of ""the great American novel"" continues to thrive almost as vigorously as in its nineteenth-century heyday, defying 150 years of attempts to dismiss it as amateurish or obsolete. In this landmark book, the first in many years to take in the whole sweep of national fiction, Lawrence Buell reanimates this supposedly antiquated idea, demonstrating that its history is a key to the dynamics of national literature and national identity itself. The canvas of the great American novel is in constant motion, reflecting revolutions in fictional fashion, the changing face of authorship, and the inseparability of high culture from popular. As Buell reveals, the elusive G.A.N. showcases the myth of the United States as a nation perpetually under construction."

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Harvard Book Store
Joan Breton Connelly: The Parthenon Enigma

Wed, Feb 19, 2014

"Harvard Book Store is pleased to welcome NYU classics professor Joan Breton Connelly for a discussion of her latest book, The Parthenon Enigma. Built in the fifth century BC, the Parthenon has been venerated for more than two millennia as the West's ultimate paragon of beauty and proportion. Since the Enlightenment, it has also come to represent our political ideals, the lavish temple to the goddess Athena serving as the model for our most hallowed civic architecture. But how much do the values of those who built the Parthenon truly correspond with our own? And apart from the significance with which we have invested it, what exactly did this marvel of human hands mean to those who made it? The Parthenon's full significance has been obscured until now owing in no small part, Connelly argues, to the frieze's dismemberment. And so her investigation concludes with a call to reunite the pieces, in order that what is perhaps the greatest single work of art surviving from antiquity may be viewed more nearly as its makers intended. Marshalling a breathtaking range of textual and visual evidence, full of fresh insights woven into a thrilling narrative that brings the distant past to life, The Parthenon Enigma is sure to become a landmark in our understanding of the civilization from which we claim cultural descent."

Forum Network

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Harvard Book Store
Michael Pollan: Cooked - A Natural History of Transformation

Mon, May 12, 2014

Bestselling author Michael Pollan explores the previously uncharted territory of his own kitchen. Here, he discovers the enduring power of the four classical elements: fire, water, air, and earth, to transform the stuff of nature into delicious things to eat and drink. Apprenticing himself to a succession of culinary masters, Pollan learns how to grill with fire, cook with liquid, bake bread, and ferment everything from cheese to beer. Each section of Cooked tracks Pollan's effort to master a single classic recipe using one of the four elements. A North Carolina barbecue pit master tutors him in the primal magic of fire; a Chez Panisse--trained cook schools him in the art of braising; a celebrated baker teaches him how air transforms grain and water into a fragrant loaf of bread; and finally, several mad-genius ""fermentos"" (a tribe that includes brewers, cheese makers, and all kinds of picklers) reveal how fungi and bacteria can perform the most amazing alchemies of all. The reader learns alongside Pollan, but the lessons move beyond the practical to become an investigation of how cooking involves us in a web of social and ecological relationships. Cooking, above all, connects us. The effects of not cooking are similarly far reaching. Relying upon corporations to process our food means we consume large quantities of fat, sugar, and salt; disrupt an essential link to the natural world; and weaken our relationships with family and friends. In fact, Cooked argues, taking back control of cooking may be the single most important step anyone can take to help make the American food system healthier and more sustainable. Reclaiming cooking as an act of enjoyment and self-reliance, learning to perform the magic of these everyday transformations, opens the door to a more nourishing life.

Food and Wellness

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Harvard Book Store
Benjamin Ross: Dead End - Suburban Sprawl and the Rebirth of American Urbanism

Fri, May 16, 2014

Harvard Book Store welcomed former president of Maryland's Action Committee for Transit and environmental consultant Benjamin Ross for a discussion of his book Dead End: Suburban Sprawl and the Rebirth of American Urbanism. More than five decades have passed since Jane Jacobs wrote her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and since a front page headline in the New York Times read, ""Cars Choking Cities as 'Urban Sprawl' Takes Over."" Yet sprawl persists, and not by mistake. It happens for a reason. As an activist and a scholar, Benjamin Ross is uniquely placed to diagnose why this is so. Dead End traces how the ideal of a safe, green, orderly retreat where hardworking members of the middle class could raise their children away from the city mutated into the McMansion and strip mall-ridden suburbs of today. Ross finds that sprawl is much more than bad architecture and sloppy planning. Its roots are historical, sociological, and economic. He uses these insights to lay out a practical strategy for change, honed by his experience leading the largest grass-roots mass transit advocacy organization in the United States. The problems of smart growth, sustainability, transportation, and affordable housing, he argues, are intertwined and must be solved as a whole. The two keys to creating better places to live are expansion of rail transit and a more genuinely democratic oversight of land use. Dead End is, ultimately, about the places where we live our lives. Both an engaging history of suburbia and an invaluable guide for today's urbanists, it will serve as a primer for anyone interested in how Americans actually live.

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Harvard Book Store