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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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Maile Meloy: Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It

Mon, Jun 28, 2010

Short story writer and novelist Maile Meloy reads and discusses her newly in paperback collection of stories, *Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It*. This collection is about the battlefields--and fields of victory--that exist in seemingly harmless spaces, in kitchens and living rooms and cars. Set mostly in the American West, the stories feature small-town lawyers, ranchers, doctors, parents, and children, and explore the moral quandaries of love, family, and friendship. A ranch hand falls for a recent law school graduate who appears unexpectedly--and reluctantly--in his remote Montana town. A young father opens his door to find his dead grandmother standing on the front step. Two women weigh love and betrayal during an early snow. Throughout the book, Meloy examines the tensions between having and wanting, as her characters try to keep hold of opposing forces in their lives: innocence and experience, risk and stability, fidelity and desire.

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Gail Caldwell: Let’s Take the Long Way Home

Thu, Aug 12, 2010

Memoirist and former Boston Globe book critic Gail Caldwell reads from her new memoir, *Let′s Take the Long Way Home*, about her dear friend and colleague, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Caroline Knapp.

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Carl Hiaasen: Star Island

Mon, Aug 2, 2010

Journalist and best-selling author Carl Hiaasen reads from and explores his thriller, *Star Island*. Having worked as a reporter, investigative journalist, and columnist for newspapers in Florida (he still writes a column for The Miami Herald), Carl Hiaasen′s fiction has always combined the page-turning atmosphere of the thriller genre with hard-hitting commentaries on modern life. Meet twenty-two-year-old Cherry Pye (née Cheryl Bunterman), a pop star since she was fourteen, as she is about to attempt a comeback from her latest drug-and-alcohol disaster. Now meet Cherry again: in the person of her “undercover stunt double,” Ann DeLusia. Ann portrays Cherry whenever the singer is too “indisposed” to go out in public. And it is Ann-mistaken-for-Cherry who is kidnapped from a South Beach hotel by obsessed paparazzo Bang Abbott. Now the challenge for Cherry’s handlers (über–stage mother; horndog record producer; nipped, tucked, and Botoxed twin publicists; weed whacker–wielding bodyguard) is to rescue Ann while keeping her existence a secret from Cherry’s public—and from Cherry herself. The situation is more complicated than they know. Ann has had a bewitching encounter with Skink—the unhinged former governor of Florida living wild in a mangrove swamp—and now he’s heading for Miami to find her.

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Daniel Kehlmann on Fame: A Novel in Nine Episodes

Mon, Sep 20, 2010

Award-winning German novelist Daniel Kehlmann, for a reading from his most recent novel, *Fame: A Novel in Nine Episodes*, just translated into English. Imagine being famous. Being recognized on the street, adored by people who have never even met you, known the world over. Wouldn’t that be great? But what if, one day, you got stuck in a country where celebrity means nothing, where no one spoke your language and you didn’t speak theirs, where no one knew your face (no book jackets, no TV) and you had no way of calling home? How would your fame help you then? What if someone got hold of your cell phone? What if they spoke to your girlfriends, your agent, your director, and started making decisions for you? And worse, what if no one believed you were you anymore? When you saw a look-alike acting your roles for you, what would you do? And what if one day you realized your magnum opus, like everything else you’d ever written, was a total waste of time, empty nonsense? What would you do next? Would your audience of seven million people keep you going? Or would you lose the capacity to keep on doing it?

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Justice Stephen Breyer: Making Our Democracy Work

Thu, Sep 30, 2010

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer discusses the role and future of the Court in American democracy, and his book *Making Democracy Work: A Judges View*. The Supreme Court is one of the most extraordinary institutions in our system of government. Charged with the responsibility of interpreting the Constitution, the nine unelected justices of the Court have the awesome power to strike down laws enacted by our elected representatives. Why does the public accept the Court's decisions as legitimate and follow them, even when those decisions are highly unpopular? What must the Court do to maintain the public's faith? How can the Court help make our democracy work? Today we assume that when the Court rules, the public will obey. But Breyer declares that we cannot take the public's confidence in the Court for granted. He reminds us that at various moments in our history, the Court's decisions were disobeyed or ignored. And through investigations of past cases, concerning the Cherokee Indians, slavery, and Brown v. Board of Education, he brilliantly captures the steps--and the missteps--the Court took on the road to establishing its legitimacy as the guardian of the Constitution. Justice Breyer discusses what the Court must do going forward to maintain that public confidence and argues for interpreting the Constitution in a way that works in practice. He forcefully rejects competing approaches that look exclusively to the Constitution's text or to the 18th-century views of the framers. Instead, he advocates a pragmatic approach that applies unchanging constitutional values to ever-changing circumstances--an approach that will best demonstrate to the public that the Constitution continues to serve us well. The Court, he believes, must also respect the roles that other actors--such as the president, Congress, administrative agencies, and the states--play in our democracy, and he emphasizes the Court's obligation to build cooperative relationships with them. Finally, Justice Breyer examines the Court's recent decisions concerning the detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, contrasting these decisions with rulings concerning the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. He uses these cases to show how the Court can promote workable government by respecting the roles of other constitutional actors without compromising constitutional principles.

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Torture, Privacy, and Presidential Power

Tue, Sep 7, 2010

Can torture ever be justified? Since 9/11 there has been an intense debate about the government’s application of torture, eavesdropping and data mining to thwart acts of terrorism. Father and son political philosophy team Charles and Gregory Fried talk about terrorism and torture with Harvard Law School professor Alan M. Dershowitz and terrorism expert Jessica Stern. When is eavesdropping acceptable? Should a kidnapper be waterboarded to reveal where his victim has been hidden? To create this seminal statement on torture and surveillance, Charles Fried and Gregory Fried have measured current controversies against the philosophies of Aristotle, Locke, Kant, and Machiavelli, and against the historic decisions, large and small, of Jefferson, Lincoln, and Pope Sixtus V, among many others. In their book *Because It Is Wrong: Torture, Privacy, and Presidential Power in the Age of Terror* they discusses the behavior and justifications of Bush government officials but also examines more broadly what should be done when high officials have broken moral and legal norms in an attempt to protect us.

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Deborah Fallows on Dreaming in Chinese

Thu, Oct 7, 2010

Deborah Fallows explores her experiences as an American living in China in her new book, *Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons in Life, Love, and Language.* Deborah Fallows has spent much of her life learning languages and traveling around the world, but nothing prepared her for the surprises of learning Mandarin, China's most common language, or the intensity of living in Shanghai and Beijing. Over time, she realized that her struggles and triumphs in studying the language of her adopted home provided small clues to deciphering the behavior and habits of its people. As her skill with Mandarin increased, bits of the language--a word, a phrase, an oddity of grammar--became windows into understanding romance, humor, protocol, relationships, and the overflowing humanity of modern China. Here she shares what she discovered about Mandarin, and how those discoveries helped her understand a culture that had at first seemed impenetrable, *Dreaming in Chinese* opens up China to westerners in an entirely new way.

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Frank Dikotter explains Mao's Great Famine

Fri, Oct 8, 2010

Frank Dikotter discusses his new book, *Maos Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958--1962*. "Between 1958 and 1962, China descended into hell. Mao Zedong threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to catch up to and overtake Britain in less than fifteen years. The experiment ended in the greatest catastrophe the country had ever known, destroying tens of millions of lives." So opens Frank Dikotter's chronicle of an era in Chinese history much speculated about but never before fully documented because access to Communist Party archives has long been restricted to all but the most trusted historians. A new archive law has opened up thousands of central and provincial documents that "fundamentally change the way one can study the Maoist era."

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Mark Vonnegut: Just Like Someone without Mental Illness

Wed, Oct 13, 2010

Mark Vonnegut talks about his memoir *Just Like Someone without Mental Illness Only More So*, a follow-up to the acclaimed *The Eden Express*. Here is Mark’s childhood spent as the son of a struggling writer in a house that eventually held seven children after his aunt and uncle died and left four orphans. And here is the world after Mark was released from a mental hospital to find his family forever altered. At the age of twenty-eight—and after nineteen rejections—Mark was accepted to Harvard Medical School, where he gained purpose, a life, and some control over his mental illness.

Mental Health Month

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Neil Landau and Matthew Frederick: 101 Things I Learned in Film School

Mon, Oct 18, 2010

Screenwriter Neil Landau talks about his bestselling *101 Things I Learned in Film School* with the creator of the *101 Things I Learned* series, Matthew Frederick. The evening includes a trivia contest on Boston film and television as well as a discussion of the how-to's and why-to's of filmmaking, screenwriting, book-to-film, and more. How does one effectively set a scene? What is the best camera angle for a particular mood? How does new technology interact with scenes? And how does one even get the financing to make a movie? These basic questions and much more are covered in this book on the film industry and making movies as a profession. With insights for someone who wants to make movies as a full-time career, or just someone who is interested in film, *101 Things I Learned in Film School* offers an inside view of the art and craft of filmmaking.

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