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

Overhaul: Obama's Emergency Rescue of the Auto Industry

Fri, Oct 15, 2010

Steven Rattner discusses the story behind the bailout and his new book, *Overhaul: An Insider's Account of the Obama Administration's Emergency Rescue of the Auto Industry.* The first real look inside Team Obama mixes political warfare and big business shakeups in equal proportions, and comes from a uniquely informed source. From his Steven Rattner's vantage point at the helm of the historic auto-industry intervention, Rattner explains the political brinkmanship, corporate mismanagement, and personalities under pressure in a high-stakes clash between Washington and Detroit. He also explains the tough choices he and his team made, working against a ticking clock and facing vocal opposition from free market champions, to keep Chrysler and General Motors in operation.

Forum Network

Partner:

Harvard Book Store
V.S. Naipaul: The Masque of Africa

Fri, Oct 22, 2010

V.S. Naipaul discusses his most recent work of travel writing as cultural history, *The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief*. V.S. Naipaul will be joined in conversation this evening by his editor, George Andreou. Like all of V. S. Naipaul’s travel books, *The Masque of Africa* encompasses a much larger narrative and purpose: to judge the effects of belief (in indigenous animisms, the foreign religions of Christianity and Islam, the cults of leaders and mythical history) upon the progress of civilization.

Forum Network

Partner:

Harvard Book Store
Oliver Sacks: The Mind's Eye

Thu, Oct 28, 2010

Oliver Sacks, neurologist and popularizer of the science of the mind, discusses his newest work, *The Mind's Eye*, in conversation with writer and editor Cullen Murphy. In *The Mind's Eye*, Oliver Sacks tells the stories of people who are able to navigate the world and communicate with others despite losing what many of us consider indispensable senses and abilities: the power of speech, the capacity to recognize faces, the sense of three-dimensional space, the ability to read, the sense of sight. For all of these people, the challenge is to adapt to a radically new way of being in the world. Sacks explores some very strange paradoxes--people who can see perfectly well but cannot recognize their own children, and blind people who become hyper--visual or who navigate by "tongue vision." He also considers more fundamental questions: How do we see? How do we think? How important is internal imagery--or vision, for that matter? Why is it that, although writing is only five thousand years old, humans have a universal, seemingly innate, potential for reading?

Forum Network

Partner:

Harvard Book Store
Best American Essays 2010

Tue, Oct 26, 2010

Series editor Robert Atwan joins contributors John Summers and Jerald Walker to discuss* The Best American Essays 2010*, the 25th anniversary volume.

Forum Network

Partner:

Harvard Book Store
Indian Ocean and the Shifting Center of Global Power

Mon, Oct 25, 2010

Robert D. Kaplan discusses the shifting center of global power and his new book, *Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power.* In *Monsoon*, an examination of the Indian Ocean region and the countries known as "Monsoon Asia," Robert D. Kaplan shows how crucial this dynamic area has become to American power in the 21st century. Like the monsoon itself, a cyclical weather system that is both destructive and essential for growth and prosperity, the rise of these countries (including India, Pakistan, China, Indonesia, Burma, Oman, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Tanzania) represents a shift in the global balance that cannot be ignored. *Monsoon* explores the multilayered world behind the headlines. Kaplan offers insights into the economic and naval strategies of China and India and how they will affect U.S. interests. He provides an on-the-ground perspective on the more volatile countries in the region, plagued by weak infrastructures and young populations tempted by extremism. This, in one of the most nuclearized areas of the world, is a dangerous mix.

Forum Network

Partner:

Harvard Book Store
Gal Beckerman: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry

Mon, Nov 1, 2010

Gal Beckerman, reporter for *The Forward*, talks about his first book, an exploration of the lives of the Jews left behind in the Soviet Union after World War II. At the end of the war, nearly three million Jews were trapped inside the Soviet Union. They lived a paradox--unwanted by a repressive Stalinist state, yet forbidden to leave. Gal Beckerman draws on newly released Soviet government documents as well as hundreds of oral interviews with refuseniks, activists, Zionist "hooligans," and Congressional staffers. He shows not only how the movement led to a mass exodus in 1989, but also how it shaped the American Jewish community, giving it a renewed sense of spiritual purpose and teaching it to flex its political muscle. He also makes a case that the movement put human rights at the center of American foreign policy for the very first time, helping to end the Cold War. The book introduces us to all the major players, from the flamboyant Meir Kahane, head of the paramilitary Jewish Defense League, to Soviet refusenik Natan Sharansky, who labored in a Siberian prison camp for over a decade, to Lynn Singer, the small, fiery Long Island housewife who went from organizing local rallies to strong-arming Soviet diplomats. This multi-generational saga provides an essential missing piece of Cold War and Jewish history.

Forum Network

Partner:

Harvard Book Store
Tim Wu: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

Fri, Nov 5, 2010

Tim Wu, policy advocate, expert on copyright and communications, and creator of the phrase "net neutrality", talks about his book, *The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires*.

Forum Network

Partner:

Harvard Book Store
Paul Auster: Sunset Park

Tue, Nov 9, 2010

Writer Paul Auster reads from his newest book, *Sunset Park*, which follows the hopes and fears of a cast of unforgettable characters brought together by the mysterious Miles Heller during the dark months of the 2008 economic collapse: An enigmatic young man employed as a trash-out worker in southern Florida obsessively photographing thousands of abandoned objects left behind by the evicted families; a group of young people squatting in an apartment in Sunset Park, Brooklyn; The Hospital for Broken Things, which specializes in repairing the artifacts of a vanished world; William Wyler′s 1946 classic *The Best Years of Our Lives*; a celebrated actress preparing to return to Broadway; an independent publisher desperately trying to save his business and his marriage; these are just some of the elements Auster weaves together in this novel about contemporary America and its ghosts.

Forum Network

Partner:

Harvard Book Store
Alex Ross: Listen to This

Wed, Nov 10, 2010

*New Yorker* music critic Alex Ross discusses his second book, *Listen to This*. *Listen to This*, which takes its title from a 2004 essay in which Ross describes his late-blooming discovery of pop music, showcases the best of his writing from more than a decade at* The New Yorker*. These pieces are dedicated to classical and popular artists alike. In a previously unpublished essay, Ross retells hundreds of years of music history--from Renaissance dances to Led Zeppelin--through a few iconic bass lines of celebration and lament. He sketches canonical composers such as Schubert, Verdi, and Brahms; gives us in-depth interviews with modern pop masters such as Bjork and Radiohead; and introduces us to music students at a Newark high school and indie-rock hipsters in Beijing. Whether his subject is Mozart or Bob Dylan, Ross shows how music expresses the full complexity of the human condition.

Forum Network

Partner:

Harvard Book Store
Stephen Greenblatt: Shakespeare's Freedom

Mon, Nov 15, 2010

Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt discusses his book, *Shakespeare's Freedom*. Shakespeare lived in a world of absolutes--of claims for the absolute authority of scripture, monarch, and God, and the authority of fathers over wives and children, the old over the young, and the gentle over the baseborn. Stephen Greenblatt, author of the best-selling *Will in the World*, shows that Shakespeare was strikingly averse to such absolutes and constantly probed the possibility of freedom from them. Again and again, Shakespeare confounds the designs and pretensions of kings, generals, and churchmen. His aversion to absolutes even leads him to probe the exalted and seemingly limitless passions of his lovers. Greenblatt explores this rich theme by addressing four of Shakespeare's preoccupations across all the genres in which he worked. He first considers the idea of beauty in Shakespeare's works, specifically his challenge to the cult of featureless perfection and his interest in distinguishing marks. He then turns to Shakespeare's interest in murderous hatred, most famously embodied in Shylock but seen also in the character Bernardine in Measure for Measure. Next Greenblatt considers the idea of Shakespearean authority--that is, Shakespeare's deep sense of the ethical ambiguity of power, including his own. Ultimately, Greenblatt takes up Shakespearean autonomy, in particular the freedom of artists, guided by distinctive forms of perception, to live by their own laws and to claim that their creations are singularly unconstrained.

Forum Network

Partner:

Harvard Book Store