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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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danah boyd: It’s Complicated - The Social Lives of Networked Teens

Tue, Feb 25, 2014

Social media scholar and youth advocate danah boyd discusses what is new about how teenagers communicate through services such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and how social media affects the quality of teens' lives. In her new, eye-opening book, youth culture and technology expert danah boyd uncovers some of the major myths regarding teens' use of social media. She explores tropes about identity, privacy, safety, danger, and bullying. Ultimately, boyd argues that society fails young people when paternalism and protectionism hinder teenagers' ability to become informed, thoughtful, and engaged citizens through their online interactions. Yet despite an environment of rampant fear-mongering, boyd finds that teens often find ways to engage and to develop a sense of identity. Boyd's conclusions are essential reading not only for parents, teachers, and others who work with teens but also for anyone interested in the impact of emerging technologies on society, culture, and commerce in years to come. Offering insights gleaned from more than a decade of original fieldwork interviewing teenagers across the United States, boyd concludes reassuringly that the kids are all right. At the same time, she acknowledges that coming to terms with life in a networked era is not easy or obvious. In a technologically mediated world, life is bound to be complicated.

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Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer

Fri, May 4, 2012

"Kenneth Mack discusses his book *Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer*. *Representing the Race* tells the story of an enduring paradox of American race relations, through the prism of a collective biography of African American lawyers who worked in the era of segregation. Practicing the law and seeking justice for diverse clients, they confronted a tension between their racial identity as black men and women and their professional identity as lawyers. Both blacks and whites demanded that these attorneys stand apart from their racial community as members of the legal fraternity. Yet, at the same time, they were expected to sympathize with African Americans. This conundrum, as Kenneth Mack shows, continues to reverberate through American politics today. Mack reorients what we thought we knew about famous figures such as Thurgood Marshall, who rose to prominence by convincing local blacks and prominent whites that he was'as nearly as possible'one of them. But he also introduces a little-known cast of characters to the American racial narrative. These include Loren Miller, the biracial Los Angeles lawyer who, after learning in college that he was black, became a Marxist critic of his fellow black attorneys and ultimately a leading civil rights advocate; and Pauli Murray, a black woman who seemed neither black nor white, neither man nor woman, who helped invent sex discrimination as a category of law. The stories of these lawyers pose the unsettling question: what, ultimately, does it mean to 'represent' a minority group in the give-and-take of American law and politics?"

Civil Rights Movement Series

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Lulu in the Sky: A Daughter of Cambodia Finds Love, Healing, and Double Happiness

Fri, May 4, 2012

"Loung Ung discusses her memoir, *Lulu in the Sky: A Daughter of Cambodia Finds Love, Healing, and Double Happiness*. Concluding the trilogy that started with her bestselling memoir, *First They Killed My Father*, Loung Ung illuminates her struggle to reconcile with her past while moving forward toward happiness. When readers first met Ung in *First They Killed My Father*, she was a young, innocent child in Cambodia. But forced by the Khmer Rouge into the life of a child soldier, she soon found herself locked in a desperate struggle for survival in Cambodia's notorious killing fields. In , her life took a turn. As a refugee in Vermont, she grappled with post-traumatic stress, cultural assimilation roadblocks, and the abandonment of her sister in Cambodia. Now, *Lulu in the Sky* tells the next chapter in Ung's life, revealing her daily struggle to keep darkness and depression at bay while she attends college and falls in love with Mark Priemer, a Midwestern archetype of American optimism. *Lulu in the Sky* is the story of Ung's tentative steps into love, activism, and marriage'a journey that takes her to a Cambodian village to reconnect with her mother's spirit, to a vocation focused on healing the landscape of her birth, and to the patience and unconditional support of a very special man."

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Paul Krugman: End This Depression Now!

Mon, May 7, 2012

"Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize'winning economist and New York Times columnist discusses his latest book, *End This Depression Now!* The Great Recession is more than four years old'and counting. Yet, as Paul Krugman points out, ""Nations rich in resources, talent, and knowledge'all the ingredients for prosperity and a decent standard of living for all'remain in a state of intense pain."" How bad have things gotten? How did the U.S. get stuck in what Krugman argues can only be called a depression? And above all, how do we free ourselves? Krugman pursues these questions, and declares that a strong recovery is just one step away, if our leaders can find the ""intellectual clarity and political will"" to end this depression now."

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Inequality and Instability: A Study of the World Economy Just Before the Great Crisis

Tue, May 8, 2012

As the reach of financial markets extends across the U.S. and the globe, interest rates, debt, and debt crises become the dominant forces driving the rise of economic inequality almost everywhere. The "super-bubble" that investor George Soros identified in rich countries for the two decades after 1980 became a super-crisis for the majority of the population, not just in the U.S. but the entire world. Economist James K. Galbraith discusses his book, *Inequality and Instability: A Study of the World Economy Just Before the Great Crisis*. In it he argues that finance is the driveshaft that links inequality to economic instability. The book challenges the viewpoint that technology is behind rising inequality. It also challenges those who have placed the blame narrowly on trade and outsourcing. *Inequality and Instability* presents evidence that the rise of inequality mirrors the stock market in the U.S. and the rise of finance and of free-market policies elsewhere.

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La Tartine Gourmande: Recipes for an Inspired Life

Mon, May 14, 2012

"Food writer and photographer Béatrice Peltre discuses her new cookbook, *La Tartine Gourmande: Recipes for an Inspired Life*. For Béatrice Peltre, author of the award-winning blog LaTartineGourmande.com, to cook is to delight in the best of what life has to offer ' the people and places she loves. With nearly 100 gluten-free recipes and anecdotes, *La Tartine Gourmande* takes the reader on a journey, not only through the meals of the day but around the world, as Peltre revisits her inspiration for each dish. Though her style is largely inspired by her native France, other influences include places as diverse as New England, Denmark, and New Zealand. Here she discusses the inspiration behind her book, her blog, her photography, her favorite cuisines and ingredients, and more."

Food and Wellness

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Ishmael Beah: Radiance of Tomorrow

Thu, Jan 9, 2014

"When Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone was published in 2007, it soared to the top of bestseller lists, becoming an instant classic: a harrowing account of Sierra Leone's civil war and the fate of child soldiers that 'everyone in the world should read' (The Washington Post). Now Beah, whom Dave Eggers has called 'arguably the most read African writer in contemporary literature,' has returned with his first novel, an affecting, tender parable about postwar life in Sierra Leone. At the center of Radiance of Tomorrow are Benjamin and Bockarie, two longtime friends who return to their hometown, Imperi, after the civil war. The village is in ruins, the ground covered in bones. As more villagers begin to come back, Benjamin and Bockarie try to forge a new community by taking up their former posts as teachers, but they're beset by obstacles: a scarcity of food; a rash of murders, thievery, rape, and retaliation; and the depredations of a foreign mining company intent on sullying the town's water supply and blocking its paths with electric wires. As Benjamin and Bockarie search for a way to restore order, they're forced to reckon with the uncertainty of their past and future alike. With the gentle lyricism of a dream and the moral clarity of a fable, Radiance of Tomorrow is a powerful novel about preserving what means the most to us, even in uncertain times."

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Gary Shteyngart: Little Failure, A Memoir

Thu, Jan 23, 2014

"Harvard Book Store and the Harvard Advocate are pleased to welcome back the bestselling author of Super Sad True Love Story, Gary Shteyngart, for a reading and discussion of his memoir, Little Failure. After three acclaimed novels, Gary Shteyngart turns to memoir in a candid, witty, deeply poignant account of his life so far. Shteyngart shares his American immigrant experience, moving back and forth through time and memory with self-deprecating humor, moving insights, and literary bravado. The result is a resonant story of family and belonging that feels epic and intimate and distinctly his own. Provocative, hilarious, and inventive, Little Failure reveals a deeper vein of emotion in Gary Shteyngart's prose. It is a memoir of an immigrant family coming to America, as told by a lifelong misfit who forged from his imagination an essential literary voice and, against all odds, a place in the world."

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Scott Stossel: My Age of Anxiety - Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind

Thu, Jan 30, 2014

Harvard Book Store is pleased to welcome the editor of The Atlantic, Scott Stossel and editor at large for Vanity Fair, Cullen Murphy for a discussion of Stossel's latest work, My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind. A riveting, revelatory, and moving account of the author's struggles with anxiety, and of the history of efforts by scientists, philosophers, and writers to understand the condition As recently as thirty-five years ago, anxiety did not exist as a diagnostic category. Today, it is the most common form of officially classified mental illness. Scott Stossel gracefully guides us across the terrain of an affliction that is pervasive yet too often misunderstood.

Mental Health Month

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Michael Ignatieff: Fire and Ashes - Success and Failure in Politics

Wed, Jan 29, 2014

"Harvard Book Store is pleased to welcome Harvard University professor Michael Ignatieff for a discussion of his book, Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics. In 2005 Michael Ignatieff left his life as a writer and professor at Harvard University to enter the combative world of politics back home in Canada. By 2008, he was leader of the country's Liberal Party and poised'should the governing Conservatives falter'to become Canada's next Prime Minister. It never happened. Today, after a bruising electoral defeat, Ignatieff is back where he started, writing and teaching what he learned."

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