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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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Christian Lander: Stuff White People Like, Coast to Coast

Sat, Jan 22, 2011

Blogger Christian Lander, founder of the website *Stuff White People Like* discusses his new book, *Whiter Shades of Pale: The Stuff White People Like, Coast to Coast, from Seattles Sweaters to Maines Microbrews*. If you thought you had white people pegged as Oscar-party-throwing, Prius-driving, Sunday *New York Times*--reading, self-satisfied latte lovers--you were right. But if you thought diversity was just for other races, then hang on to your eco-friendly tote bags. Veteran white person Christian Lander is back with new information and advice on dealing with the Caucasian population. Sure, their indie-band T-shirts, trendy politics, vegan diets, and pop-culture references make them all seem the same. But a closer look reveals that from Austin to Australia, from L.A. to the U.K., indigenous white people are as different from one another as 1 percent rBGH-free milk is different from 2 percent. Where do skinny jeans and bulky sweaters rule? Where is down-market beer the nectar of the hip?

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Susan Cheever on Louisa May Alcott

Thu, Nov 18, 2010

Susan Cheever, novelist, memoirist, literary historian, and daughter of John Cheever, discusses her newest exploration of America's literary past, *Louisa May Alcott: A Personal Biography*. Louisa May Alcott never intended to write *Little Women*. She had dismissed her publishers pleas for such a novel. Written out of necessity to support her family, the book had an astounding success that changed her life, a life which turned out very differently from that of her beloved heroine Jo March. In *Louisa May Alcott*, Susan Cheever returns to Concord, Massachusetts, to explore the life of one of its most iconic residents. Based on extensive research, journals, and correspondence, Cheevers biography chronicles all aspects of Alcott's life, from the fateful meeting of her parents to her death, just two days after that of her father. She details Bronson Alcott's stalwart educational vision, which led the Alcotts to relocate each time his progressive teaching went sour; her unsuccessful early attempts at serious literature; her time as a Civil War nurse, when she contracted pneumonia and was treated with mercury-laden calomel, which would affect her health for the rest of her life; and her vibrant intellectual circle of writers and reformers, idealists who led the charge in support of antislavery, temperance, and women's rights.

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Salman Rushdie on Luka and the Fire of Life

Mon, Nov 29, 2010

Salman Rushdie reads from his newest novel, *Luka and the Fire of Life*, a follow-up to the much beloved *Haroun and the Sea of Stories*. This new novel centers on Luka, Haroun's younger brother, who must save his father from certain doom. For Rashid Khalifa, the legendary storyteller of Kahani, has fallen into deep sleep from which no one can wake him. To keep his father from slipping away entirely, Luka must travel to the Magic World and steal the ever-burning Fire of Life. Thus begins a quest replete with unlikely creatures, strange alliances, and seemingly insurmountable challenges as Luka and an assortment of enchanted companions race through peril after peril, pass through the land of the Badly Behaved Gods, and reach the Fire itself, where Luka's fate, and that of his father, will be decided.

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Raj Patel: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy

Mon, Jan 11, 2010

Activist Raj Patel discusses his new book, *The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy*, with radio's *On Point* producer, John Wihbey. In *The Value of Nothing*, Raj Patel, a long-time visionary in issues of global development, points to the inadequecy of price as a measure of value, and urges us to look at the larger environmental, political, and social cost of the goods we consume. The book reveals that our current crisis is not simply the result of too much of the wrong kind of economics. While we need to rethink our economic model, Patel argues that the larger failure beneath the food, climate, and economic crises is a political one. If economics is about choices, Patel writes, it isn't often said who gets to make them. *The Value of Nothing* offers an accessible way to think about economics and the choices we will all need to make in order to create a sustainable economy and society.

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Jaron Lanier: You Are Not a Gadget

Wed, Jan 13, 2010

Computer scientist Jaron Lanier discusses his new book, *You Are Not a Gadget*. Jaron Lanier, a Silicon Valley visionary since the 1980s, was among the first to predict the revolutionary changes the World Wide Web would bring to commerce and culture. Now, in his first book, written more than two decades after the web was created, Lanier offers this provocative and cautionary look at the way it is transforming our lives for better and for worse. The current design and function of the web have become so familiar that it is easy to forget that they grew out of programming decisions made decades ago. The web's first designers made crucial choices (such as making one's presence anonymous) that have had enormous--and often unintended--consequences. What's more, these designs quickly became "locked in," a permanent part of the web's very structure. Lanier discusses the technical and cultural problems that can grow out of poorly considered digital design and warns that our financial markets and sites like Wikipedia, Facebook, and Twitter are elevating the "wisdom" of mobs and computer algorithms over the intelligence and judgment of individuals.

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Charlotte Dennett: The People v. Bush

Wed, Jan 20, 2010

Journalist-turned-lawyer Charlotte Dennett discusses her new book, *The People v. Bush: One Lawyer's Campaign to Bring the President to Justice and the National Grassroots Movement She Encountered Along the Way*. When Charlotte Dennett became outraged that Bush White House officials were acting above the law, she did something that surprised even herself. She ran for a state attorney general seat on a platform to prosecute George W. Bush for murder. She lost the race, but found a movement--one that continues its quest to hold leaders accountable to US law and preserve a Constitutional presidency.

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Don Lattin: The Harvard Psychedelic Club

Thu, Jan 14, 2010

Journalist and religion writer Don Lattin gives an inside look into *The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America*. The Harvard Psychedelic Club is the story of how three brilliant scholars and one ambitious freshman crossed paths in Cambridge in the winter of 1960-61, and how their experiences in a psychedelic drug research project transformed their lives and much of American culture in the 1960s and 1970s. They came together in a time of upheaval and experimentation, and they set the stage for the social, spiritual, sexual, and psychological revolution of the 1960s. Huston Smith would be the teacher, practicing every world religion and educating three generations of Americans to adopt a more tolerant, inclusive attitude toward other culture's religions. Richard Alpert would be the seeker, traveling to India, returning to America as "Ram Dass" and reborn as a spiritual leader with his "Be Here Now" mantra, inspiring a restless army of spiritual pilgrims. Andrew Weil would be the healer, becoming the undisputed leader of alternative medicine, devoting his life to the holistic reformation of the American health care system. And Timothy Leary would play the rebellious trickster, the premier proponent of the therapeutic and spiritual benefits of LSD, advising a generation to "turn on, tune in, and drop out."

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Joseph Stiglitz: America and the Sinking of the World Economy

Mon, Jan 25, 2010

Nobel Prize--winning economist Joseph Stiglitz talks about his new treatise, *Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy*, in conversation with writer and editor Cullen Murphy. Although the current financial crisis is global in reach, it has its roots in the mismanagement, on multiple levels, of the American economy. In *Freefall*, Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz explains how America exported bad economics, bad policies, and bad behavior to the rest of the world, only to cobble together a haphazard and ineffective response when the markets finally seized up. Drawing on his academic expertise, his years spent shaping policy in the Clinton administration and at the World Bank, and his more recent role as head of a UN commission charged with reforming the global financial system, Stiglitz outlines a way forward building on ideas that he has championed his entire career: restoring the balance between markets and government, addressing the inequalities of the global financial system, and demanding more good ideas (and less ideology) from economists.

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Robert Darnton: The Case for Books

Wed, Feb 3, 2010

Robert Darnton, director of the Harvard University Library, discusses the historical and cultural importance of the printed word. In *The Case for Books*, Robert Darnton, an intellectual pioneer in the field of the history of the book and director of Harvard University's Library, offers an in-depth examination of the book from its earliest beginnings to its shifting role today in popular culture, commerce, and the academy. As an author, editorial advisor, and publishing entrepreneur, Darnton is a unique authority on the life and role of the book in society. This book is a wise work of scholarship--one that requires readers to carefully consider how the digital revolution will broadly affect the marketplace of ideas. In *The Devil in the Holy Water*, Darnton offers a startling new perspective on the origins of the French Revolution and the development of a revolutionary political culture in the years after 1789. He opens with an account of the colony of French refugees in London who churned out slanderous attacks on public figures in Versailles and of the secret agents sent over from Paris to squelch them. The libelers were not above extorting money for pretending to destroy the print runs of books they had duped the government agents into believing existed; the agents were not above recognizing the lucrative nature of such activities--and changing sides.

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Keeping the Feast: One Couple's Story of Love, Food, and Healing in Italy

Tue, Mar 2, 2010

Journalist Paula Butturini talks about her new memoir *Keeping the Feast: One Couple's Story of Love, Food, and Healing in Italy*. Paula and John met in Italy, fell in love, and four years later, married in Rome. But less than a month after the wedding, tragedy struck. They had transferred from their Italian paradise to Warsaw and while reporting on an uprising in Romania, John was shot and nearly killed by sniper fire. Although he recovered from his physical wounds in less than a year, the process of healing had just begun. Unable to regain his equilibrium, he sank into a deep sadness that reverberated throughout their relationship. It was the abrupt end of what they'd known together, and the beginning of a new phase of life neither had planned for. All of a sudden, Paula was forced to reexamine her marriage, her husband, and herself. Paula began to reconsider all of her previous assumptions about healing. She discovered that sometimes patience can be a vice, anger a virtue. That sometimes it is vital to make demands of the sick, that they show signs of getting better. And she rediscovered the importance of the most fundamental of human rituals: the daily sharing of food around the family table.

Food and Wellness

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