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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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Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

Wed, Mar 21, 2012

Daron Acemoglu discusses his book, *Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty*. Acemoglu answers the question that have stumped the experts for centuries: Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine? Is it culture, the weather, geography? Perhaps ignorance of what the right policies are? Acemoglu argues that none of these factors is either definitive or destiny. Otherwise, how to explain why Botswana has become one of the fastest growing countries in the world, while other African nations, such as Zimbabwe, the Congo, and Sierra Leone, are mired in poverty and violence? Acemoglu and co-author James Robinson demonstrate that it is man-made political and economic institutions that underlie economic success (or lack of it). Based on fifteen years of original research, Acemoglu and Robinson marshall historical evidence from the Roman Empire, the Mayan city-states, medieval Venice, the Soviet Union, Latin America, England, Europe, the United States, and Africa to build a new theory of political economy."

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Rachel Maddow - Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power

Sun, Apr 1, 2012

Rachel Maddow discusses her book, *Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power*. *Drift* argues that the U.S. has drifted away from its original ideals and become a nation weirdly at peace with perpetual war, with all the financial and human costs that entails. To understand how we've arrived at such a dangerous place, Maddow explores numerous changes that have taken place from the Vietnam War to today's war in Afghanistan. She discusses the rise of executive authority, the gradual outsourcing of war-making capabilities to private companies, the plummeting percentage of American families whose children fight in wars, and even the changing fortunes of G.I. Joe. Ultimately, she demonstrates just how much could be lost by allowing the priorities of national security to overpower political discourse.

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Hanne Blank - Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality

Thu, Apr 5, 2012

"Author and historian Hanne Blank discusses her book *Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality*. Like the typewriter and the light bulb, Blank argues that the heterosexual was invented in the 1860s and swiftly and permanently transformed Western culture. The idea of 'the heterosexual' was unprecedented. Men and women had been having sex, marrying, building families, and falling in love for millennia without having any special name for their emotions or acts. Yet, within half a century, 'heterosexual' had become a byword for 'normal,' enshrined in law, medicine, psychiatry, and the media as a new gold standard for human experience. In this chronicle, Blank digs deep into the past of sexual orientation, while simultaneously exploring its contemporary psyche. Illuminating the hidden patterns in centuries of events and trends, Blank shows how culture creates and manipulates the ways we think about and experience desire, love, and relationships between men and women."

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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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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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Erik Brynjolfsson & Andrew McAfee: The Second Machine Age

Thu, Feb 6, 2014

"Harvard Book Store is pleased to welcome the director of the MIT Center for Digital Business, Erik Brynjolfsson, and Andrew McAfee, one of the principal research scientists at the Center, for a discussion of their book, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. The authors were joined in conversation by Meghna Chakrabarti, co-host of WBUR's Radio Boston. In The Second Machine Age MIT's Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee'two thinkers at the forefront of their field'reveal the forces driving the reinvention of our lives and our economy. As the full impact of digital technologies is felt, we will realize immense bounty in the form of dazzling personal technology, advanced infrastructure, and near-boundless access to the cultural items that enrich our lives."

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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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Jennifer Senior: All Joy And No Fun - The Paradox of Modern Parenthood

Fri, Feb 7, 2014

"Thousands of books have examined the effects of parents on their children. In All Joy and No Fun, award-winning journalist Jennifer Senior now asks: what are the effects of childrenon their parents? In All Joy and No Fun, award-winning journalist Jennifer Senior tries to tackle this question, isolating and analyzing the many ways in which children reshape their parents' lives, whether it's their marriages, their jobs, their habits, their hobbies, their friendships, or their internal senses of self. She argues that changes in the last half century have radically altered the roles of today's mothers and fathers, making their mandates at once more complex and far less clear."

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Lawrence Buell: The Dream Of The Great American Novel

Thu, Feb 20, 2014

"Harvard Book Store is pleased to welcome Lawrence Buell, Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature at Harvard University, for a discussion of his book The Dream of the Great American Novel. The idea of ""the great American novel"" continues to thrive almost as vigorously as in its nineteenth-century heyday, defying 150 years of attempts to dismiss it as amateurish or obsolete. In this landmark book, the first in many years to take in the whole sweep of national fiction, Lawrence Buell reanimates this supposedly antiquated idea, demonstrating that its history is a key to the dynamics of national literature and national identity itself. The canvas of the great American novel is in constant motion, reflecting revolutions in fictional fashion, the changing face of authorship, and the inseparability of high culture from popular. As Buell reveals, the elusive G.A.N. showcases the myth of the United States as a nation perpetually under construction."

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