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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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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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Shankar Vedantam: The Hidden Brain

Tue, Feb 9, 2010

Washington Post columnist Shankar Vedantam discusses his book *The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives*. The hidden brain is Vedantam’s shorthand for a host of brain functions, emotional responses, and cognitive processes that happen outside of our conscious awareness, but that have a decisive effect on how we behave. The hidden brain has its finger on the scale when we make all of our most complex and important decisions—it decides who we fall in love with, whether we should convict someone of murder, or which way to run when someone yells “fire!” Vedantam, longtime author of the Washington Post’s popular “Department of Human Behavior” column, takes us on a tour of this phenomenon and explores its consequences. Using original reporting that combines the latest scientific research with narratives that take readers from the American campaign trail to terrorist indoctrination camps, Vedantam illuminates the dark recesses of our minds while making an argument about how we can compensate for our blind spots—and what happens when we don't.

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Leo Damrosch: Tocqueville’s Discovery of America

Thu, Apr 22, 2010

Leo Damrosch, the Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature at Harvard University, discusses of his new book, *Tocqueville’s Discovery of America*, and an exploration of Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous journey through the fledgling nation. Alexis de Tocqueville is more quoted than read; commentators across the political spectrum invoke him as an oracle who defined America and its democracy for all times. But in fact his masterpiece, *Democracy in America*, was the product of a young man’s open-minded experience of America at a time of rapid change. In *Tocqueville’s Discovery of America*, the prizewinning biographer Leo Damrosch retraces Tocqueville’s nine-month journey through the young nation in 1831–1832, illuminating how his enduring ideas were born of imaginative interchange with America and Americans, and painting a vivid picture of Jacksonian America.

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David Remnick: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

Thu, Apr 29, 2010

David Remnick, a *New Yorker* editor and noted journalist, shares with us his thoughts on the historic 2008 presidential election and his new book, *The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama*. No story has been more central to America's history this century than the rise of Barack Obama, and until now, no journalist or historian has written a book thatfully investigates the circumstances and experiences of Obama's life or explores the ambition behind his rise. Those familiar with Obama's own best-selling memoir or his campaign speeches know the touchstones and details that he chooses to emphasize, but now--from a writer whose gift for illuminating the historical significance of unfolding events is without peer--we have a portrait of a young man in search of himself, and of a rising politician determined to become the first African American president.

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Martha Nussbaum: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law

Fri, Mar 26, 2010

Distinguished professor of law and philosophy Martha Nussbaum discusses the status of gay rights in the context of constitutional law and her new book, *From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law*. In *From Disgust to Humanity*, Martha Nussbaum argues that disgust has long been among the fundamental motivations of those who are fighting for legal discrimination against lesbian and gay citizens. When confronted with same-sex acts and relationships, she writes, they experience "a deep aversion akin to that inspired by bodily wastes, slimy insects, and spoiled food--and then cite that very reaction to justify a range of legal restrictions, from sodomy laws to bans on same-sex marriage." Leon Kass, former head of President Bush's President's Council on Bioethics, even argues that this repugnance has an inherent "wisdom," steering us away from destructive choices. Nussbaum believes that the politics of disgust must be confronted directly, for it contradicts the basic principle of the equality of all citizens under the law.

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Nell Irvin Painter: The History of White People

Mon, Mar 29, 2010

Nell Irvin Painter, an American historian discusses her newest work, *The History of White People*. * In The History of White People*, Nell Irvin Painter tells perhaps the most important forgotten story in American history. Beginning at the roots of Western civilization, she traces the invention of the idea of a white race--often for economic, scientific, and political ends. She shows how the origins of American identity in the 18th century were intrinsically tied to the elevation of white skin into the embodiment of beauty, power, and intelligence; how the great American intellectuals--including Ralph Waldo Emerson--insisted that only Anglo Saxons were truly American; and how the definitions of who is "white" and who is "American" have evolved over time. *The History of White People closes* a gap in a literature that has long focused on the nonwhite, and it forcefully reminds us that the concept of "race" is a human invention whose meaning, importance, and reality have changed according to a long and rich history.

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Robert Whitaker: Rise of Mental Illness in America

Tue, Apr 13, 2010

Robert Whitaker, award-winning science and medicine journalist, discusses his new book, *Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America*. Why has the number of disabled mentally ill in the United States tripled over the past two decades? Every day, 1,100 adults and children are added to the government disability rolls because they have become newly disabled by mental illness, with this epidemic spreading most rapidly among our nation’s children. *Anatomy of an Epidemic* first investigates what is known today about the biological causes of mental disorders. Do psychiatric medications fix “chemical imbalances” in the brain, or do they, in fact, *create* them? Then comes the scientific query at the heart of this book: During the past 50 years, when investigators looked at how psychiatric drugs affected long-term outcomes, what did they find? Did they discover that the drugs help people stay well? Function better? Enjoy good physical health? Or did they find that these medications, for some paradoxical reason, *increase* the likelihood that people will become chronically ill, less able to function well, more prone to physical illness?

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Robin Black: If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This

Mon, May 3, 2010

Robin Black, award-winning short story writer, reads from her first full-length collection, *If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This*. Robin Black’s stories and essays have appeared in many publications and have been recognized as notable by the Pushcart Prizes, *The Best American Essays, and The Best American Non-required Reading*. In this, her first short story collection, she plumbs the depths of love, loss, and hope. A father struggles to forge an independent identity as his blind daughter prepares for college. A mother comes to terms with her adult daughter’s infidelity, even as she keeps a disturbing secret of her own. An artist mourns the end of a romance while painting a dying man’s portrait. An accident on a trip to Italy and an unexpected connection with a stranger cause a woman to question her lifelong assumptions about herself.

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Daniel Okrent: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition

Wed, May 12, 2010

Daniel Okrent, noted editor and historian author, discusses his new social history *Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition*. From its start, America has been awash in drink. The sailing vessel that brought John Winthrop to the shores of the New World in 1630 carried more beer than water. By the 1820s, liquor flowed so plentifully it was cheaper than tea. That Americans would ever agree to relinquish their booze was as improbable as it was astonishing. Yet Americans did, and *Last Call* is Daniel Okrent’s explanation of why they did it, what life under prohibition was like, and how such an unprecedented degree of government interference in the private lives of Americans changed the country forever. Okrent reveals how prohibition marked a confluence of diverse forces: the growing political power of the women’s suffrage movement, which allied itself with the antiliquor campaign; the fear of small-town, native-stock Protestants that they were losing control of their country to the immigrants of the large cities; the anti-German sentiment stoked by World War I; and a variety of other unlikely factors, ranging from the rise of the automobile to the advent of the income tax. Through it all, Americans kept drinking, going to remarkably creative lengths to smuggle, sell, conceal, and convivially (and sometimes fatally) imbibe their favorite intoxicants.

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Norris Church Mailer: A Ticket to the Circus

Thu, May 13, 2010

Norris Church Mailer, novelist and Norman Mailer's muse, discusses her new memoir, *A Ticket to the Circus*. Growing up a strict Free Will Baptist in the south of the 1950s, Norris Church, christened Barbara Jean Davis, was crowned "Little Miss Little Rock" at the age of three and always knew that life had more to offer her than the comforts of small-town Arkansas. But she could never have guessed that in her early 20's she would date future president Bill Clinton (and predict his national victory even after he lost his first run for Congress), or that the following year she would meet Norman Mailer, who was passing through town giving a lecture at the local college. They fell in love in one night--and their marriage lasted 33 years. Despite her enduring love for the man, Norris found life with the writer full of challenges--from carving out her own niche in the wake of five ex-wives and numerous former girlfriends, to easing her way into the hearts of her seven stepchildren, to negotiating the ferocious world of Mailer's fame, friends, and literary life. The couple's New York parties were legendary, and their social circle included such luminaries as Muhammad Ali, Jacqueline Kennedy, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, and Imelda Marcos. Their decades-long obsession with each other, as seen in the intimate letters that Norris reveals here for the first time, was not without tests and infidelities; theirs was a marriage full of friendship, betrayal, doubts, understanding, and deep, complicated, lifelong passion.

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