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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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Bob Mankoff: How About Never - Is Never Good for You

Wed, Apr 9, 2014

Harvard Book Store and The Harvard Lampoon welcomed the cartoon editor from The New Yorker Bob Mankoff for a discussion of his book How About Never'Is Never Good for You?: My Life in Cartoons. People tell Bob Mankoff that as the cartoon editor of The New Yorker he has the best job in the world. Never one to beat around the bush, he explains to us, in the opening of this singular, delightfully eccentric book, that because he is also a cartoonist at the magazine he actually has two of the best jobs in the world. With the help of myriad images and his funniest, most beloved cartoons, he traces his love of the craft all the way back to his childhood, when he started doing funny drawings at the age of eight. After meeting his mother, we follow his unlikely stints as a high-school basketball star, draft dodger, and sociology grad student. Though Mankoff abandoned the study of psychology in the seventies to become a cartoonist, he recently realized that the field he abandoned could help him better understand the field he was in, and here he takes up the psychology of cartooning, analyzing why some cartoons make us laugh and others don't. He allows us into the hallowed halls of The New Yorker to show us the soup-to-nuts process of cartoon creation, giving us a detailed look not only at his own work, but that of the other talented cartoonists who keep us laughing week after week. For desert, he reveals the secrets to winning the magazine's caption contest. Throughout How About Never'Is Never Good for You?, we see his commitment to the motto ""Anything worth saying is worth saying funny." **This video has been edited for sound quality issues.

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Annalee Newitz: Scatter, Adapt, and Remember

Thu, Apr 10, 2014

"Harvard Book Store welcomes science journalist and editor of io9.com Annalee Newitz and contributing editor for Vanity Fair Seth Mnookin for a discussion of Newitz's new-to-paperback book Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction. As a species, Homo sapiens is at a crossroads. Study of our planet's turbulent past suggests that we are overdue for a catastrophic disaster, whether caused by nature or by human interference. It's a frightening prospect, as each of the Earth's past major disasters'from meteor strikes to bombardment by cosmic radiation'resulted in a mass extinction, where more than 75 percent of the planet's species died out. But in Scatter, Adapt, and Remember, Annalee Newitz explains that although global disaster is all but inevitable, our chances of long-term species survival are better than ever. Life on Earth has come close to annihilation'humans have, more than once, narrowly avoided extinction just during the last million years'but every single time a few creatures survived, evolving to adapt to the harshest of conditions. This speculative work of popular science focuses on humanity's long history of dodging the bullet, as well as on new threats that we may face in years to come. Most important, it explores how scientific breakthroughs today will help us avoid disasters tomorrow. From simulating tsunamis to studying central Turkey's ancient underground cities; from cultivating cyanobacteria for ""living cities"" to designing space elevators to make space colonies cost-effective; from using math to stop pandemics to studying the remarkable survival strategies of gray whales, scientists and researchers the world over are discovering the keys to long-term resilience and learning how humans can choose life over death."

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John Demos: The Heathen School

Thu, Apr 17, 2014

Harvard Book Store welcomed Yale professor and National Book Award finalist John Demos for a discussion of his book The Heathen School: A Story of Hope and Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic in conversation with Megan Marshall, author of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life. Near the start of the nineteenth century, as the newly established United States looked outward toward the wider world, a group of eminent Protestant ministers formed a grand scheme for gathering the rest of mankind into the redemptive fold of Christianity and "civilization." Its core element was a special school for "heathen youth" drawn from all parts of the earth, including the Pacific Islands, China, India, and, increasingly, the native nations of North America. If all went well, graduates would return to join similar projects in their respective homelands. For some years, the school prospered, indeed became quite famous. However, when two Cherokee students courted and married local women, public resolve 'and fundamental ideals' were put to a severe test. The Heathen School follows the progress, and the demise, of this first true melting pot through the lives of individual students: among them, Henry Obookiah, a young Hawaiian who ran away from home and worked as a seaman in the China Trade before ending up in New England; John Ridge, son of a powerful Cherokee chief and subsequently a leader in the process of Indian "removal"; and Elias Boudinot, editor of the first newspaper published by and for Native Americans. From its birth as a beacon of hope for universal "salvation," the heathen school descends into bitter controversy, as American racial attitudes harden and intensify. Instead of encouraging reconciliation, the school exposes the limits of tolerance and sets off a chain of events that will culminate tragically in the Trail of Tears.

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Thomas Piketty: Capital

Fri, Apr 18, 2014

Harvard Book Store welcomed Paris School of Economics professor Thomas Piketty for a discussion of his seminal new work Capital in the Twenty-First Century. What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings will transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about wealth and inequality. Piketty shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx. But we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II. The main driver of inequality 'the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth 'today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values. But economic trends are not acts of God. Political action has curbed dangerous inequalities in the past, Piketty says, and may do so again.

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Elizabeth Warren: A Fighting Chance

Thu, Apr 24, 2014

First-term Massachusetts State Senator **Elizabeth Warren** spoke last April to a sold-out crowd about her biography, _A Fighting Chance._ Sponsored by the Harvard Book Store at First Parish Church in Cambridge, Warren talks about her family history, including her parents and how she was given the chance to succeed. She also discusses her stance on big banks, the middle class, and what education policies need to be put in place to help students pay for higher education.

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Ramachandra Guha: Gandhi Before India

Tue, Apr 29, 2014

Harvard Book Store welcomed award-winning author Ramachandra Guha and President of the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, Pratap Bhanu Mehta for a discussion of Guha's new book Gandhi Before India. Here is a revelatory work of biography that takes us from Mohandas Gandhi's birth in 1869 through his upbringing in Gujarat, his two years as a student in London, and his two decades as a lawyer and community organizer in South Africa. Ramachandra Guha has uncovered a myriad of previously untapped documents, including private papers of Gandhi's contemporaries and co-workers, contemporary newspapers and court documents, the writings of Gandhi's children, secret files kept by British Empire functionaries. Using this wealth of material in a brilliantly nuanced narrative, Guha describes the social, political, and personal worlds in which Gandhi began his journey to become the modern era's most important and influential political actor. And Guha makes clear that Gandhi's work in South Africa-far from being a mere prelude to his accomplishments in India-was profoundly influential on his evolution as a political thinker, social reformer, and beloved leader.

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Michael Pollan: Cooked - A Natural History of Transformation

Mon, May 12, 2014

Bestselling author Michael Pollan explores the previously uncharted territory of his own kitchen. Here, he discovers the enduring power of the four classical elements: fire, water, air, and earth, to transform the stuff of nature into delicious things to eat and drink. Apprenticing himself to a succession of culinary masters, Pollan learns how to grill with fire, cook with liquid, bake bread, and ferment everything from cheese to beer. Each section of Cooked tracks Pollan's effort to master a single classic recipe using one of the four elements. A North Carolina barbecue pit master tutors him in the primal magic of fire; a Chez Panisse--trained cook schools him in the art of braising; a celebrated baker teaches him how air transforms grain and water into a fragrant loaf of bread; and finally, several mad-genius ""fermentos"" (a tribe that includes brewers, cheese makers, and all kinds of picklers) reveal how fungi and bacteria can perform the most amazing alchemies of all. The reader learns alongside Pollan, but the lessons move beyond the practical to become an investigation of how cooking involves us in a web of social and ecological relationships. Cooking, above all, connects us. The effects of not cooking are similarly far reaching. Relying upon corporations to process our food means we consume large quantities of fat, sugar, and salt; disrupt an essential link to the natural world; and weaken our relationships with family and friends. In fact, Cooked argues, taking back control of cooking may be the single most important step anyone can take to help make the American food system healthier and more sustainable. Reclaiming cooking as an act of enjoyment and self-reliance, learning to perform the magic of these everyday transformations, opens the door to a more nourishing life.

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Benjamin Ross: Dead End - Suburban Sprawl and the Rebirth of American Urbanism

Fri, May 16, 2014

Harvard Book Store welcomed former president of Maryland's Action Committee for Transit and environmental consultant Benjamin Ross for a discussion of his book Dead End: Suburban Sprawl and the Rebirth of American Urbanism. More than five decades have passed since Jane Jacobs wrote her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and since a front page headline in the New York Times read, ""Cars Choking Cities as 'Urban Sprawl' Takes Over."" Yet sprawl persists, and not by mistake. It happens for a reason. As an activist and a scholar, Benjamin Ross is uniquely placed to diagnose why this is so. Dead End traces how the ideal of a safe, green, orderly retreat where hardworking members of the middle class could raise their children away from the city mutated into the McMansion and strip mall-ridden suburbs of today. Ross finds that sprawl is much more than bad architecture and sloppy planning. Its roots are historical, sociological, and economic. He uses these insights to lay out a practical strategy for change, honed by his experience leading the largest grass-roots mass transit advocacy organization in the United States. The problems of smart growth, sustainability, transportation, and affordable housing, he argues, are intertwined and must be solved as a whole. The two keys to creating better places to live are expansion of rail transit and a more genuinely democratic oversight of land use. Dead End is, ultimately, about the places where we live our lives. Both an engaging history of suburbia and an invaluable guide for today's urbanists, it will serve as a primer for anyone interested in how Americans actually live.

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Laurence Tribe: Uncertain Justice - The Roberts Court and the Constitution

Tue, Jun 10, 2014

From Citizens United to its momentous rulings regarding Obamacare and gay marriage, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts has profoundly affected American life. Yet the court remains a mysterious institution, and the motivations of the nine men and women who serve for life are often obscure. Harvard University Constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe shows the surprising extent to which the Roberts Court is revising the meaning of our Constitution in his book Uncertain Justice: The Roberts Court and the Constitution, co-authored by Joshua Matz. Filled with original insights and compelling human stories, _Uncertain Justice_ illuminates the most colorful story of how the Supreme Court and the Constitution frame the way we live.

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Linda Hill and Emily Truelove: Collective Genius - The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation

Thu, Jun 12, 2014

Harvard Book Store welcomed Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School Linda Hill and MIT Sloan School of Management researcher Emily Truelove for a discussion of their book Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation. You might think the key to innovation is attracting exceptional creative talent. Or making the right investments. Or breaking down organizational silos. All of these things may help'but there's only one way to ensure sustained innovation: you need to lead it'and with a special kind of leadership. Collective Genius shows you how. Preeminent leadership scholar Linda Hill, along with former Pixar tech wizard Greg Brandeau, MIT researcher Emily Truelove, and Being the Boss coauthor Kent Lineback, found among leaders a widely shared, and mistaken, assumption: that a 'good' leader in all other respects would also be an effective leader of innovation. The truth is, leading innovation takes a distinctive kind of leadership, one that unleashes and harnesses the 'collective genius' of the people in the organization.

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