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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.

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Jill McCorkle: Going Away Shoes

Tue, Oct 6, 2009

Jill McCorkle reads from her new collection of short stories, *Going Away Shoes*. With her trademark wit and intelligence, McCorkle's new collection provides variations on the theme of women confronting the dark and difficult sides of love. From a woman about to embark on her first adulterous affair to the siblings who struggle with their widowed father's new love interest, the lives these stories follow can be full of heartbreak, but McCorkle's tenderness and humor make them feel lived in and purely believable.

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How Our Social Networks Shape Our Lives

Mon, Oct 12, 2009

Harvard professor of sociology and health care policy Nicholas Christakis discusses *Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives*. Nicholas Christakis and fellow scientist James Fowler finally met, after having worked in adjoining buildings on the same university campus for several years, when introduced by a mutual friend. Their common intellectual interests in the power of this very phenomenon, social networks, eventually led them to write *Connected*, an exploration of the role that social networks play in our lives, how they are formed, how they are maintained, and how far-reaching their effects can be. *Connected* shows that our world is governed by the Three Degrees Rule -- we influence and are influenced by people up to three degrees removed from us, most of whom we do not even know. For example, your friend's friend's friend has more impact on your happiness than $5,000 in your pocket. Our social networks underlie financial scams, eating disorders, substance abuse, and suicide clusters, but also voter turnout, innovation, altruism, and "random" acts of kindness.

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Barbara Ehrenreich: How Positive Thinking Undermines America

Thu, Oct 15, 2009

Journalist and activist Barbara Ehrenreich discusses her book, *Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America*. She shares how her own experience dealing with breast cancer showed her that the dogma of the positive thinking movement can lead to individual self-blame, and how institutional disregard for possible negative outcomes led to the national housing crisis. Americans have a singular capacity for glossing over hardships with exhortations to "look on the bright side." The oft-prescribed power of positive thinking is certainly capable of altering our outlooks, but as Ehrenreich argues in her new book, this is not entirely for the better. This is Ehrenreich at her provocative best--poking holes in conventional wisdom and faux science, and calling for existential clarity and courage.

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Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya: The Storyteller of Marrakesh

Mon, Feb 7, 2011

Novelist Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya reads from his U.S.-debut novel, *The Storyteller of Marrakesh*. Each year, the storyteller, Hassan, gathers listeners to the city square to share their recollections of a young, foreign couple who mysteriously disappeared years earlier. As various witnesses describe their encounters with the couple--their tales overlapping, confirming, and contradicting each other--Hassan hopes to light upon details that will explain what happened to them, and to absolve his own brother, who is in prison for their disappearance. As testimonies circle an elusive truth, the couple takes on an air as enigmatic as their fate. But is this annual storytelling ritual a genuine attempt to uncover the truth, or is it intended instead to weave an ambiguous mythology around a crime?

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American Uprising: The Untold Story of America's Largest Slave Revolt

Thu, Feb 10, 2011

Historian Daniel Rasmussen discusses his first book, *American Uprising: The Untold Story of America's Largest Slave Revolt*. In January 1811, five hundred slaves, dressed in military uniforms and armed with guns, cane knives, and axes, rose up from the plantations around New Orleans and set out to conquer the city. Ethnically diverse, politically astute, and highly organized, this self-made army challenged not only the economic system of plantation agriculture but also American expansion. Their march represented the largest act of armed resistance against slavery in the history of the United States. *American Uprising* tells the long-neglected story of this elaborate plot, the rebel army's dramatic march on the city, and its shocking conclusion. With the Haitian revolution a recent memory and the War of 1812 looming on the horizon, the revolt had epic consequences for America.

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Sherry Turkle: Expecting More from Technology and Less from Each Other

Fri, Feb 4, 2011

MIT professor of technology and society Sherry Turkle discusses the effect our technology has on our social relationships and her new book, *Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other*. Consider Facebook--it's a form of human contact, only easier to engage with and easier to avoid. Developing technology promises closeness. Sometimes it delivers, but much of our modern life leaves us less connected with people and more connected to simulations of them. In *Alone Together*, Sherry Turkle explores the power of our new tools and toys to dramatically alter our social lives. It's an exploration of what we are looking for--and sacrificing--in a world of electronic companions and social networking tools, and an argument that, despite the hand-waving of today's self-described prophets of the future, it will be the next generation who will chart the path between isolation and connectivity.

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Ida Hattemer-Higgins: The History of History

Wed, Jan 19, 2011

Boston native, world traveler, and debut novelist Ida Hattemer-Higgins reads from her first book, *The Hisory of History*. A young woman named Margaret stumbles one morning from a forest outside Berlin, hands dirty, clothes torn. She can remember nothing of the night in the woods, nor--she soon realizes--anything of the previous months. She returns home to her former life. Two years later, she receives a letter from a mysterious doctor, who summons her to an appointment, claiming to be concerned for her fate. Margaret keeps the appointment, but when she leaves the doctor's office, the entire city is transformed. Nazi ghosts manifest as preening falcons; buildings turn to flesh; reality itself wheels. This is the story of Margaret's race to recover her lost history--the night in the forest, and the chasm that opened in her life as a result. Awash in guilt, careening toward a shattering revelation, Margaret finds her personal amnesia resonating more and more clamorously with a nation's criminal past, as she struggles toward an awakening that will lead her through madness to the truth, and to the unanswerable agony of her own actions.

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Parag Khanna: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance

Thu, Feb 17, 2011

Parag Khanna discusses his vision of future foreign relations, *How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance*. *How to Run the World* posits a chaotic modern era that resembles the Middle Ages, with Asian empires, Western militaries, Middle Eastern sheikhdoms, magnetic city-states, wealthy multinational corporations, elite clans, religious zealots, tribal hordes, and potent media seething in an ever more unpredictable and dangerous storm. But just as that initial “dark age” ended with the Renaissance, Khanna believes that our time can become a great and enlightened age as well—only, though, if we harness our technology and connectedness to forge new networks among governments, businesses, and civic interest groups to tackle the crises of today and avert those of tomorrow.

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Country Driving: A Chinese Road Trip

Wed, Feb 9, 2011

*The New Yorker's* longtime Beijing correspondent Peter Hessler discusses his latest exploration of everyday life in China, *Country Driving: A Chinese Road Trip*. *Country Driving* begins with Hessler's 7,000-mile trip across northern China, following the Great Wall, from the East China Sea to the Tibetan plateau. He investigates a historically important rural region being abandoned, as young people migrate to jobs in the southeast. Next Hessler spends six years in Sancha, a small farming village in the mountains north of Beijing, which changes dramatically after the local road is paved and the capital's auto boom brings new tourism. Finally, he turns his attention to urban China, researching development over a period of more than two years in Lishui, a small southeastern city where officials hope that a new government-built expressway will transform a farm region into a major industrial center.

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Dambisa Moyo: Fifty Years of Economic Folly, and the Stark Choices Ahead

Mon, Feb 14, 2011

Economist and bestselling author Dambisa Moyo discusses America's economic future and her book, *How the West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly—and the Stark Choices Ahead*. In *How the West Was Lost*, Moyo sheds light on how a host of shortsighted policy decisions have left the economic seesaw poised to tip away from America and toward the emerging world. Faced with this impending calamity, the United States can choose either to remain open to the international economy or to close itself off, adopting protectionist policies that will give the country time and space to redress these pervasive structural problems.

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