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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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Oliver Sacks: The Mind's Eye

Thu, Oct 28, 2010

Oliver Sacks, neurologist and popularizer of the science of the mind, discusses his newest work, *The Mind's Eye*, in conversation with writer and editor Cullen Murphy. In *The Mind's Eye*, Oliver Sacks tells the stories of people who are able to navigate the world and communicate with others despite losing what many of us consider indispensable senses and abilities: the power of speech, the capacity to recognize faces, the sense of three-dimensional space, the ability to read, the sense of sight. For all of these people, the challenge is to adapt to a radically new way of being in the world. Sacks explores some very strange paradoxes--people who can see perfectly well but cannot recognize their own children, and blind people who become hyper--visual or who navigate by "tongue vision." He also considers more fundamental questions: How do we see? How do we think? How important is internal imagery--or vision, for that matter? Why is it that, although writing is only five thousand years old, humans have a universal, seemingly innate, potential for reading?

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Indian Ocean and the Shifting Center of Global Power

Mon, Oct 25, 2010

Robert D. Kaplan discusses the shifting center of global power and his new book, *Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power.* In *Monsoon*, an examination of the Indian Ocean region and the countries known as "Monsoon Asia," Robert D. Kaplan shows how crucial this dynamic area has become to American power in the 21st century. Like the monsoon itself, a cyclical weather system that is both destructive and essential for growth and prosperity, the rise of these countries (including India, Pakistan, China, Indonesia, Burma, Oman, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Tanzania) represents a shift in the global balance that cannot be ignored. *Monsoon* explores the multilayered world behind the headlines. Kaplan offers insights into the economic and naval strategies of China and India and how they will affect U.S. interests. He provides an on-the-ground perspective on the more volatile countries in the region, plagued by weak infrastructures and young populations tempted by extremism. This, in one of the most nuclearized areas of the world, is a dangerous mix.

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Best American Essays 2010

Tue, Oct 26, 2010

Series editor Robert Atwan joins contributors John Summers and Jerald Walker to discuss* The Best American Essays 2010*, the 25th anniversary volume.

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Gal Beckerman: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry

Mon, Nov 1, 2010

Gal Beckerman, reporter for *The Forward*, talks about his first book, an exploration of the lives of the Jews left behind in the Soviet Union after World War II. At the end of the war, nearly three million Jews were trapped inside the Soviet Union. They lived a paradox--unwanted by a repressive Stalinist state, yet forbidden to leave. Gal Beckerman draws on newly released Soviet government documents as well as hundreds of oral interviews with refuseniks, activists, Zionist "hooligans," and Congressional staffers. He shows not only how the movement led to a mass exodus in 1989, but also how it shaped the American Jewish community, giving it a renewed sense of spiritual purpose and teaching it to flex its political muscle. He also makes a case that the movement put human rights at the center of American foreign policy for the very first time, helping to end the Cold War. The book introduces us to all the major players, from the flamboyant Meir Kahane, head of the paramilitary Jewish Defense League, to Soviet refusenik Natan Sharansky, who labored in a Siberian prison camp for over a decade, to Lynn Singer, the small, fiery Long Island housewife who went from organizing local rallies to strong-arming Soviet diplomats. This multi-generational saga provides an essential missing piece of Cold War and Jewish history.

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Robert Darnton: Poetry and the Police

Tue, Nov 2, 2010

Robert Darnton, director of the Harvard University Libraries, discusses his new book *Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris*. In spring 1749, Francois Bonis, a medical student in Paris, found himself unexpectedly hauled off to the Bastille for distributing an "abominable poem about the king." So began the Affair of the Fourteen, a police crackdown on ordinary citizens for unauthorized poetry recitals. Why was the official response to these poems so intense? In *Poetry and the Police*, Robert Darnton follows the poems as they passed through several media: copied on scraps of paper, dictated from one person to another, memorized and declaimed to an audience. But the most effective dispersal occurred through music, when poems were sung to familiar tunes. Lyrics often referred to current events or revealed popular attitudes toward the royal court. The songs provided a running commentary on public affairs, and Darnton traces how the lyrics fit into song cycles that carried messages through the streets of Paris during a period of rising discontent. He uncovers a complex communication network, illuminating the way information circulated in a semi-literate society.

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The Best American Short Stories 2010

Wed, Nov 3, 2010

Series editor Heidi Pitlor moderates a panel discussion on *The Best American Short Stories 2010* with this years guest editor, Richard Russo, and contributors Brendan Mathews and Steve Almond.

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Kwame Anthony Appiah: How Moral Revolutions Happen

Thu, Nov 4, 2010

Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah discusses honor and its place in social and political movements throughout modern history through his new book is *The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen*. Long neglected as an engine of reform, honor emerges at the center of our modern world in Kwame Anthony Appiah's *The Honor Code*. Over the last few centuries, new democratic movements have led to the emancipation of women, slaves, and the oppressed. But what drove these modern changes, Appiah argues, was not imposing legislation from above, but harnessing the ancient power of honor from within. In gripping detail, he explores the end of the duel in aristocratic England, the tumultuous struggles over footbinding in nineteenth-century China, and the uprising of ordinary people against Atlantic slavery. Finally, he confronts the horrors of "honor killing" in contemporary Pakistan, where rape victims are murdered by their relatives. He argues that honor, used to justify the practice, can also be the most effective weapon against it.

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Tim Wu: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

Fri, Nov 5, 2010

Tim Wu, policy advocate, expert on copyright and communications, and creator of the phrase "net neutrality", talks about his book, *The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires*.

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Stephen Greenblatt: Shakespeare's Freedom

Mon, Nov 15, 2010

Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt discusses his book, *Shakespeare's Freedom*. Shakespeare lived in a world of absolutes--of claims for the absolute authority of scripture, monarch, and God, and the authority of fathers over wives and children, the old over the young, and the gentle over the baseborn. Stephen Greenblatt, author of the best-selling *Will in the World*, shows that Shakespeare was strikingly averse to such absolutes and constantly probed the possibility of freedom from them. Again and again, Shakespeare confounds the designs and pretensions of kings, generals, and churchmen. His aversion to absolutes even leads him to probe the exalted and seemingly limitless passions of his lovers. Greenblatt explores this rich theme by addressing four of Shakespeare's preoccupations across all the genres in which he worked. He first considers the idea of beauty in Shakespeare's works, specifically his challenge to the cult of featureless perfection and his interest in distinguishing marks. He then turns to Shakespeare's interest in murderous hatred, most famously embodied in Shylock but seen also in the character Bernardine in Measure for Measure. Next Greenblatt considers the idea of Shakespearean authority--that is, Shakespeare's deep sense of the ethical ambiguity of power, including his own. Ultimately, Greenblatt takes up Shakespearean autonomy, in particular the freedom of artists, guided by distinctive forms of perception, to live by their own laws and to claim that their creations are singularly unconstrained.

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Brainstorm: Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences

Fri, Nov 19, 2010

Rebecca M. Jordan-Young, an expert in the biological components of sex, gender, and sexuality discusses her book, *Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Sciences of Sex Differences*. Female and male brains are different, thanks to hormones coursing through the brain before birth. That's taught as fact in psychology textbooks, academic journals, and bestselling books. And these hardwired differences explain everything from sexual orientation to gender identity, to why there aren't more women physicists or more stay-at-home dads. In this new book, Jordan-Young takes on the evidence that sex differences are hardwired into the brain. Analyzing virtually all published research that supports the claims of "human brain organization theory," Jordan-Young reveals how often these studies fail the standards of science. Even if careful researchers point out the limits of their own studies, other researchers and journalists can easily ignore them because brain organization theory just sounds so right. But if a series of methodological weaknesses, questionable assumptions, inconsistent definitions, and enormous gaps between ambiguous findings and grand conclusions have accumulated through the years, then science isn't scientific at all.

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