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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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Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life

Fri, Apr 16, 2010

Steve Almond, *New York Times* best-selling author presents *Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life*, a musical extravaganza in celebration of his new book about obsessive fandom. The evening will include literary explorations of classic hits by Styx, Toto, and other bands you are now ashamed to admit you once loved, along with other selections from the book, which *Publishers Weekly* calls "a hilarious riff on the power of music." The show closes with a live set by the utterly rocking Boris McCutcheon & The Salt Licks. With a life that’s spanned the phonographic era and the digital age, Steve Almond lives to Rawk. Like you, he’s secretly longed to live the life of a rock star, complete with insane talent, famous friends, and hotel rooms to be trashed. Also like you, he’s had to settle for the life of a rabid fan, one who has converted his unrequited desires into a (sort of) noble obsession.

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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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Peter Carey: Parrot and Olivier in America

Mon, Apr 26, 2010

Peter Carey, a two-time Booker Prize-winning novelist reads from his newest book, *Parrot and Olivier in America*. Olivier--an improvisation on the life of Alexis de Tocqueville--is the traumatized child of aristocratic survivors of the French Revolution. Parrot is the motherless son of an itinerant English printer. They are born on different sides of history, but their lives will be connected by an enigmatic one-armed marquis. When Olivier sets sail for the nascent United States--ostensibly to make a study of the penal system, but more precisely to save his neck from one more revolution--Parrot will be there, too: as spy for the marquis, and as protector, foe, and foil for Olivier. As the narrative shifts between the perspectives of Parrot and Olivier, between their picaresque adventures apart and together--in love and politics, prisons and finance, homelands and brave new lands--a most unlikely friendship begins to take hold. And with their story, Peter Carey explores the experiment of American democracy.

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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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Nino Ricci: The Origin of Species

Mon, May 10, 2010

Nino Ricci reads from his new novel, *The Origin of Species*, which was awarded the 2008 Governor General's Award for Fiction and is now being published in the United States for the first time. Montreal during the turbulent mid-1980s: Chernobyl has set Geiger counters thrumming across the globe, HIV/AIDS is cutting a deadly swath through the gay population worldwide, and locally, tempers are flaring over the recent codification of French as the official language of Quebec. Hiding out in a seedy apartment, Alex Fratarcangeli, an awkward, 30-something grad student, is plagued by the sensation that his entire life is a fraud. Scarred by a distant father and a dangerous relationship with his ex, Liz, and consumed by a floundering dissertation linking Darwin's theory of evolution with the history of human narrative, Alex has come to view love and other human emotions as "evolutionary surplus, haphazard neural responses that nature had latched onto for its own insidious purposes." When Alex receives a letter from Ingrid, the beautiful woman he knew years ago in Sweden, notifying him of the existence of his five-year-old son, he is gripped by a paralytic terror. Whenever Alex's thoughts grow darkest, he recalls Desmond, the British professor with dubious credentials whom he met years ago in the Galapagos. Treacherous and despicable, wearing his ignominy like his rumpled jacket, Desmond nonetheless caught Alex in his thrall and led him to some life-altering truths during their weeks exploring Darwin's islands together. It is only now that Alex can begin to comprehend these unlikely life lessons, and see a glimmer of hope shining through what he had thought was meaninglessness.

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The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates

Mon, May 17, 2010

Wes Moore, combat veteran and former White House Fellow, discusses chance, fate, family, and accountability and his new book *The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates*. He then introduces representatives from non-profit organizations that work to provide opportunity for at-risk students. In December 2000, the *Baltimore Sun* ran a small piece about Wes Moore, a local student who had just received a Rhodes Scholarship. The same paper also ran a series of articles about four young men who had allegedly killed a police officer in a spectacularly botched armed robbery. The police were still hunting for two of the suspects who had gone on the lam, a pair of brothers. One was named Wes Moore. Wes couldn't shake off the unsettling coincidence, or the inkling that the two shared much more than space in the same newspaper. After following the story of the robbery, the manhunt, and the trial to its conclusion, he wrote a letter to the other Wes, now a convicted murderer serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole. His letter tentatively asked the questions that had been haunting him: Who are you? How did this happen? That letter led to a correspondence and relationship that have lasted for several years. Over dozens of letters and prison visits, Wes discovered that the other Wes had had a life not unlike his own: Both had grown up in similar neighborhoods and had had difficult childhoods, both were fatherless; they'd hung out on similar corners with similar crews, and both had run into trouble with the police. At each stage of their young lives they had come across similar moments of decision, yet their choices would lead them to astonishingly different destinies.

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Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Impact of the Highly Improbable

Wed, May 19, 2010

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, renowned expert on risk and randomness, discusses *The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable*. This bestselling book is now out in paperback with a new essay, "On Robustness and Fragility." A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives. Why do we not acknowledge the phenomenon of black swans until after they occur? Part of the answer, according to Taleb, is that humans are hardwired to learn specifics when they should be focused on generalities. We concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don’t know. We are, therefore, unable to truly estimate opportunities, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize, and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the “impossible.” This lecture contains strong language.

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Stephen Burt: Art of the Sonnet

Fri, May 21, 2010

Stephen Burt, Harvard professor of English, looks at one of the English language’s most beloved art forms and his new book, *The Art of the Sonnet.* Few poetic forms have found more uses than the sonnet in English, and none is now more recognizable. It is one of the longest-lived of verse forms, and one of the briefest. A mere 14 lines, fashioned by intricate rhymes, it is, as Dante Gabriel Rossetti called it, "a moment’s monument." From the Renaissance to the present, the sonnet has given poets a superb vehicle for private contemplation, introspection, and the expression of passionate feelings and thoughts. *The Art of the Sonnet * collects 100 exemplary sonnets of the English language (and a few sonnets in translation), representing highlights in the history of the sonnet, accompanied by short commentaries on each of the poems. The commentaries by Stephen Burt and his coauthor David Mikics offer new perspectives and insights, and, taken together, demonstrate the enduring as well as changing nature of the sonnet. The authors serve as guides to some of the most-celebrated sonnets in English as well as less-well-known gems by 19th and 20th century poets. Also included is a general introductory essay, in which the authors examine the sonnet form and its long and fascinating history, from its origin in medieval Sicily to its English appropriation in the sixteenth century to sonnet writing today in the US, the UK, and other English-speaking parts of the world.

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Claude Steele: How Stereotypes Affect Us

Tue, May 25, 2010

Claude Steele, acclaimed social psychologist, discusses identity and his new book *Whistling Vivaldi and Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us.* Through illustrative personal stories, Claude Steele shares the experiments and studies that show, again and again, that exposing subjects to stereotypes—merely reminding a group of female math majors about to take a math test, for example, that women are considered naturally inferior to men at math—impairs their performance in the area affected by the stereotype. Steele’s conclusions shed new light on a host of American social phenomena, from the racial and gender gaps in standardized test scores to the belief in the superior athletic prowess of black men. Steele explicates the dilemmas that arise in every American’s life around issues of identity, from the white student whose grades drop steadily in his African American studies class to the female engineering students deciding whether or not to attend predominantly male professional conferences. *Whistling Vivaldi* offers insight into how we form our senses of identity and ultimately lays out a plan for mitigating the negative effects of “stereotype threat” and reshaping American identities.

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Al Gore: A Plan to Solve the Global Climate Crisis

Sat, Nov 7, 2009

Former US Vice President and climate change activist Al Gore discusses his new book *Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Global Climate Crisis*. In his follow-up to the best selling *An Inconvenient Truth*, the Nobel Peace Prize—winning former vice president outlines a comprehensive strategy for combating the impending global climate crisis, while at the same time addressing long-standing issues of global poverty and inequality.

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