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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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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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Alex Myers: Revolutionary

Fri, Jan 31, 2014

Harvard Book Store is pleased to welcome teacher, activist, and Harvard alum Alex Myers, the first openly transgender student at Harvard University, for a discussion of his novel Revolutionary. In 1782, during the final clashes of the Revolutionary War, one of our young nation's most valiant and beloved soldiers was, secretly, a woman. When Deborah Samson disguised herself as a man and joined the Continental Army, she wasn't just fighting for America's independence'she was fighting for her own.

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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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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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Salaam, Love: American Muslim Men on Love, Sex, and Intimacy

Tue, Feb 11, 2014

"Harvard Book Store is pleased to welcome Ayesha Mattu and Nura Maznavi, editors of Love, InshAllah: The Secret Love Lives of American Muslim Women, along with four of their contributors: Ahmed Akbar, Dan I. Oversaw, Mohammed Samir Shamma, and Sam Pierstorff for a discussion of Mattu's and Maznavi's latest work, Salaam, Love: American Muslim Men on Love, Sex, and Intimacy. From the editors of the groundbreaking anthology Love, InshAllah comes a provocative new exploration of the most intimate parts of Muslim men's lives. By raising their voices to share stories of love and heartbreak, loyalty and betrayal, intimacy and insecurity, these Muslim men are leading the way for all men to recognize that being open and honest about their feelings is not only okay'it's intimately connected to their lives and critical to their happiness and well-being."

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Howard Eiland: Walter Benjamin - A Critical Life

Fri, Feb 7, 2014

"Harvard Book Store is pleased to welcome Howard Eiland, lecturer for literature at MIT, for a discussion of his book Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life, co-authored with Michael W. Jennings. Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings make available for the first time a rich store of information which augments and corrects the record of an extraordinary life. They offer a comprehensive portrait of Benjamin and his times as well as extensive commentaries on his major works, including ""The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,"" the essays on Baudelaire, and the great study of the German Trauerspiel. "

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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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Joan Breton Connelly: The Parthenon Enigma

Wed, Feb 19, 2014

"Harvard Book Store is pleased to welcome NYU classics professor Joan Breton Connelly for a discussion of her latest book, The Parthenon Enigma. Built in the fifth century BC, the Parthenon has been venerated for more than two millennia as the West's ultimate paragon of beauty and proportion. Since the Enlightenment, it has also come to represent our political ideals, the lavish temple to the goddess Athena serving as the model for our most hallowed civic architecture. But how much do the values of those who built the Parthenon truly correspond with our own? And apart from the significance with which we have invested it, what exactly did this marvel of human hands mean to those who made it? The Parthenon's full significance has been obscured until now owing in no small part, Connelly argues, to the frieze's dismemberment. And so her investigation concludes with a call to reunite the pieces, in order that what is perhaps the greatest single work of art surviving from antiquity may be viewed more nearly as its makers intended. Marshalling a breathtaking range of textual and visual evidence, full of fresh insights woven into a thrilling narrative that brings the distant past to life, The Parthenon Enigma is sure to become a landmark in our understanding of the civilization from which we claim cultural descent."

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Neil Swidey: Trapped Under The Sea

Wed, Feb 26, 2014

"The harrowing story of five men who were sent into a dark, airless, miles-long tunnel, hundreds of feet below the ocean, to do a nearly impossible job'with deadly results. A quarter-century ago, Boston had the dirtiest harbor in America. The city had been dumping sewage into it for generations, coating the seafloor with a layer of ""black mayonnaise."" Fisheries collapsed, wildlife fled, and locals referred to floating tampon applicators as ""beach whistles."" In the 1990s, work began on a state-of-the-art treatment plant and a 10-mile-long tunnel'its endpoint stretching farther from civilization than the earth's deepest ocean trench'to carry waste out of the harbor. With this impressive feat of engineering, Boston was poised to show the country how to rebound from environmental ruin. But when bad decisions and clashing corporations endangered the project, a team of commercial divers was sent on a perilous mission to rescue the stymied cleanup effort. Five divers went in; not all of them came out alive. Suspenseful yet humane, Trapped Under the Sea reminds us that behind every bridge, tower, and tunnel'behind the infrastructure that makes modern life possible'lies unsung bravery and extraordinary sacrifice."

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Peniel Joseph: Stokely - A Life

Thu, Mar 6, 2014

"Harvard Book Store and the Hutchins Center are pleased to welcome award-winning author and Tufts University history professor Peniel Joseph for a discussion of his latest book, Stokely: A Life. Stokely Carmichael, the charismatic and controversial black activist, stepped onto the pages of history when he called for ""Black Power"" during a speech one Mississippi night in 1966. A firebrand who straddled both the American civil rights and Black Power movements, Carmichael would stand for the rest of his life at the center of the storm he had unleashed that night. In Stokely, preeminent civil rights scholar Peniel E. Joseph presents a groundbreaking biography of Carmichael, using his life as a prism through which to view the transformative African American freedom struggles of the twentieth century. During the heroic early years of the civil rights movement, Carmichael and other civil rights activists advocated nonviolent measures, leading sit-ins, demonstrations, and voter registration efforts in the South that culminated with the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Still, Carmichael chafed at the slow progress of the civil rights movement and responded with Black Power, a movement that urged blacks to turn the rhetoric of freedom into a reality through whatever means necessary. Marked by the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., a wave of urban race riots, and the rise of the anti-war movement, the late 1960s heralded a dramatic shift in the tone of civil rights. Carmichael became the revolutionary icon for this new racial and political landscape, helping to organize the original Black Panther Party in Alabama and joining the iconic Black Panther Party for Self Defense that would galvanize frustrated African Americans and ignite a backlash among white Americans and the mainstream media. Yet at the age of twenty-seven, Carmichael made the abrupt decision to leave the United States, embracing a pan-African ideology and adopting the name of Kwame Ture, a move that baffled his supporters and made him something of an enigma until his death in 1998."

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