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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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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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David Weinberger: Too Big to Know

Fri, Jan 27, 2012

"David Weinberger, senior researcher at the Berkman Center discusses his latest book, *Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room is the Room*. Knowledge used to be a more straightforward matter than it is now; answers came from books or experts. But in the Internet age, knowledge has moved onto networks. There is more knowledge than ever, but it is different: topics have no boundaries, and disagreement is much more prevalent. Weinberger argues that this is not a cause for despair however, and he explores how business, science, education, and the government are learning to use networked knowledge to understand more than ever and to make smarter decisions than they could when they had to rely on books and experts alone."

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Collaborate or Perish! Reaching Across Boundaries in a Networked World

Wed, Feb 1, 2012

"In *Collaborate or Perish!*, William Bratton and Zachary Tumin lay out a field-tested playbook for collaborating across the boundaries of our new, networked world. Today, when everyone is connected, collaboration is the game changer. Agencies and firms, citizens and groups who can collaborate, Bratton and Tumin argue, will thrive in the networked world; those who can't are doomed to perish. Boston native William Bratton is known around the world for his ability to get citizens, governments, and industries working together to improve the safety of cities. At Harvard, Zachary Tumin has led executives from government and industry in sessions and classrooms for over a decade. Together, they draw on in-depth accounts from Fortune 100 companies, and the education, social work, and military sectors to discuss the keys to effective collaboration. "

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Jodi Kantor: The Obamas

Tue, Jan 31, 2012

"Jodi Kantor, New York Times correspondent, discusses *The Obamas*, her portrait of the first couple, and addresses the recent media attention and controversy around the book. In *The Obamas*, Jodi Kantor takes the reader inside the White House as the Obamas try to grapple with their new roles, change the country, raise children, maintain friendships, and figure out what it means to be the first black President and First Lady. "

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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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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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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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