Forum Network

Free online lectures: Explore a world of ideas

Funding provided by:

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

Isabel Wilkerson: Epic Story of America’s Great Migration

Tue, Sep 14, 2010

Pulitzer Prize--winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson discusses her first book, *The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration*. In *The Warmth of Other Suns*, Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. Having interviewed more than a thousand people and gained access to new data and official records, she recounts how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves. Wilkerson tells this story through the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success and, in old age, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senate seat; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, where he endangered his job fighting for civil rights, saw his family fall, and finally found peace in God; and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career, the personal physician to Ray Charles as part of a glitteringly successful medical career, which allowed him to purchase a grand home where he often threw exuberant parties. Wilkerson captures their first treacherous and exhausting cross-country trips by car and train and their new lives in colonies that grew into ghettos, as well as how they changed these cities with southern food, faith, and culture and improved them with discipline, drive, and hard work.

Civil Rights Movement Series

Partner:

Harvard Book Store
Tony Blair: My Political Life

Thu, Sep 16, 2010

Former British prime minister Tony Blair discusses his new political memoir, *A Journey: My Political Life*, in conversation with noted journalist and editor Tina Brown. Tony Blair's emergence as Labour Party leader in 1994 marked a seismic shift in British politics. Within a few short years, he had transformed his party and rallied the country behind him, becoming prime minister in 1997 with the biggest victory in Labour's history, and bringing to an end 18 years of Conservative government. He took Labour to a historic three terms in office as Britain's dominant political figure of the last two decades. *A Journey* is Tony Blair's firsthand account of his years in office and beyond. Here he describes for the first time his role in shaping our recent history, from the aftermath of Princess Diana's death to the war on terror. He reveals the leadership decisions that were necessary to reinvent his party, the relationships with colleagues including Gordon Brown, the grueling negotiations for peace in Northern Ireland, the implementation of the biggest reforms to public services in Britain since 1945, and his relationships with leaders on the world stage--Nelson Mandela, Bill Clinton, Vladimir Putin, George W. Bush. He analyzes the belief in ethical intervention that led to his decisions to go to war in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, and, most controversially of all, in Iraq. Few British prime ministers have shaped the nation's course as profoundly as Tony Blair, and his achievements and legacy will be debated for years to come.

Forum Network

Partner:

Harvard Book Store
Gwynne Dyer: Climate Wars

Thu, Sep 16, 2010

Journalist and historian in war studies Gwynne Dyer explores the cultural and political ramifications of climate change and discusses his new book, *Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats*. Dwindling resources. Massive population shifts. Natural disasters. Spreading epidemics. Drought. Rising sea levels. Plummeting agricultural yields. Crashing economies. Political extremism. These are just some of the expected consequences of runaway climate change in the decades ahead--and any of them could tip the world towards conflict.

Forum Network

Partner:

Harvard Book Store
String Theory and the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions

Fri, Sep 17, 2010

Shing-Tung Yau, chair of Harvard's Mathematics department, and science journalist Steve Nadis discuss their new explication of string theory, *The Shape of Inner Space: String Theory and the Geometry of the Universes Hidden Dimensions*. String theory says we live in a 10-dimensional universe, but that only four are accessible to our everyday senses. According to theorists, the missing six are curled up in bizarre structures known as Calabi-Yau manifolds. In *The Shape of Inner Space*, Shing-Tung Yau, the man who mathematically proved that these manifolds exist, argues that not only is geometry fundamental to string theory, it is also fundamental to the very nature of our universe. Time and again, where Yau has gone, physics has followed. Now for the first time, readers will follow Yau's thinking on where we've been, and where mathematics will take us next.

Forum Network

Partner:

Harvard Book Store
Robert B. Reich: The Next Economy and America’s Future

Fri, Sep 24, 2010

Public policy expert and former US Secretary of Labor Robert B. Reich takes us into the aftermath of the economic crisis with his book *Aftershock: The Next Economy and America′s Future*. When the nation’s economy foundered in 2008, blame was directed almost universally at Wall Street. But Robert B. Reich suggests a different reason for the meltdown, and for a perilous road ahead. He argues that the real problem is structural: it lies in the increasing concentration of income and wealth at the top, and in a middle class that has had to go deeply into debt to maintain a decent standard of living. Persuasively and straightforwardly, Reich reveals how precarious our situation still is. The last time in American history when wealth was so highly concentrated at the top—indeed, when the top 1 percent of the population was paid 23 percent of the nation’s income—was in 1928, just before the Great Depression. Such a disparity leads to ever greater booms followed by ever deeper busts. Reich’s account of where we are headed over the next decades reveals the essential truth about our economy that is driving our politics and shaping our future. With keen insight, he shows us how the middle class lacks enough purchasing power to buy what the economy can produce and has adopted coping mechanisms that have a negative impact on their quality of life; how the rich use their increasing wealth to speculate; and how an angrier politics emerges as more Americans conclude that the game is rigged for the benefit of a few. Unless this trend is reversed, the Great Recession will only be repeated.

Forum Network

Partner:

Harvard Book Store
James Howard Kunstler: The Witch of Hebron

Tue, Sep 28, 2010

James Howard Kunstler reads from his novel, *The Witch of Hebron*, a sequel to 2008's *World Made by Hand*. In *The Witch of Hebron*, Kunstler expands on his vision of a post-oil society with a new novel about an America in which the electricity has flickered off, the Internet is a distant memory, and the government is little more than a rumor. In the tiny hamlet of Union Grove, New York, travel is horse-drawn and farming is back at the center of life. But it's no pastoral haven. Wars are fought over dwindling resources and illness is a constant presence. Bandits roam the countryside, preying on the weak. And a sinister cult threatens to shatter Union Grove's fragile stability.

Forum Network

Partner:

Harvard Book Store
The Tenth Parallel: The Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam

Wed, Sep 22, 2010

Award-winning investigative journalist Eliza Griswold discusses one of the richest, though often contentious, ideological battlegrounds in current world culture--the meeting of Christianity and Islam across Africa and Asia--as described in her book, *The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam*. The tenth parallel--the line of latitude seven hundred miles north of the equator--is a geographical and ideological front line where Christianity and Islam collide. More than half of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims live along the tenth parallel; so do 60 percent of the world's 2 billion Christians. Here, in the buzzing megacities and swarming jungles of Africa and Asia, is where the two religions meet; their encounter is shaping the future of each faith, and of whole societies as well. An investigative journalist and poet, Eliza Griswold has spent the past seven years traveling between the equator and the tenth parallel: in Nigeria, the Sudan, and Somalia, and in Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. The stories she tells in *The Tenth Parallel* show us that religious conflicts are also conflicts about land, water, oil, and other natural resources, and that local and tribal issues are often shaped by religious ideas. Above all, she makes clear that, for the people she writes about, one's sense of God is shaped by one's place on earth; along the tenth parallel, faith is geographic and demographic.

Forum Network

Partner:

Harvard Book Store
Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan: The Fall

Thu, Sep 23, 2010

Director Guillermo del Toro and author Chuck Hogan discuss *The Fall*, the second installment in the *Strain Trilogy*. The pair are interviewed by the Brattle Theatre's creative director, Ned Hinkle. The vampiric virus unleashed in *The Strain* has taken over New York City. It is spreading across the country and soon, the world. Amid the chaos, Eph Goodweather, head of the CDC′s team and one of a small group who have banded together to fight the bloodthirsty monsters that roam the streets, finally manages to identify the parasite that causes the infection. But it may be too late.

Pop Culture

Partner:

Harvard Book Store
David A. Kessler: The End of Overeating

Tue, Oct 5, 2010

**David A, Kessler,** former commissioner of the US food & drug administration, discusses ways the food industry manipulates the way we eat through his book, *The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite*. Most of us know what it feels like to fall under the spell of food-when one slice of pizza turns into half a pie, or a handful of chips leads to an empty bag. Its harder to understand why we cant seem to stop eating, even when we know better. *The End of Overeating* explains for the first time why it is exceptionally difficult to resist certain foods and why its so easy to overindulge, uncovering facts about how we lose control over our eating habits, and how we can get it back.

Forum Network

Partner:

Harvard Book Store
Daniel J. Carlat: The Trouble with Psychiatry

Wed, Jun 2, 2010

Noted psychiatrist and mental health journalist Daniel J. Carlat holds a discussion about the current state of the field of psychiatry and his new book, *Unhinged: The Trouble with Psychiatry—A Doctor’s Revelations About a Profession in Crisis*. In *Unhinged*, Daniel Carlat exposes deeply disturbing problems plaguing his profession, revealing the ways it has abandoned its essential purpose: to understand the mind, so that psychiatrists can heal mental illness and not just treat symptoms. Psychiatrists have settled for treating symptoms rather than causes, embracing the apparent medical rigor of DSM diagnoses and prescription in place of learning the more challenging craft of therapeutic counseling, gaining only limited understanding of their patients’ lives. Talk therapy takes time, whereas the fifteen-minute "med check" allows for more patients and more insurance company reimbursement. Yet DSM diagnoses, he shows, are premised on a good deal less science than we would think. Writing from an insider’s perspective, Dr. Carlat shares a wealth of stories from his own practice and those of others that demonstrate the glaring shortcomings of the standard fifteen-minute patient visit. He also reveals the dangers of rampant diagnoses of bipolar disorder, ADHD, and other "popular" psychiatric disorders, and exposes the risks of the cocktails of medications so many patients are put on. Especially disturbing are the terrible consequences of overprescription of drugs to children of ever younger ages. Taking us on a tour of the world of pharmaceutical marketing, he also reveals the inner workings of collusion between psychiatrists and drug companies.

Forum Network

Partner:

Harvard Book Store