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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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  • Chris Kimball and the cast of America's Test Kitchen discuss healthy and delicious ways to feed your family, and their new book, *The Americas Test Kitchen Healthy Family Cookbook*. *The Healthy Family Cookbook* is an all-purpose cookbook that delivers more than 800 foolproof recipes for healthier everyday cooking--including breakfast dishes, kid-friendly favorites, meat and pasta entres, vegetarian dishes, healthy makeovers of family classics, desserts, and more. Each recipe also includes calories, fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, carbohydrates, protein, fiber, and sodium counts. *The America's Test Kitchen Healthy Family Cookbook* takes a good, hard look at eating healthfully--incorporating more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains into recipes on a daily basis, and reducing calories from fat whenever possible while still maximizing taste. But unlike other "healthy recipe" cookbooks that simply substitute brown rice for white, or fat-free mayonnaise for regular, every one of our recipes have been specifically developed for the ingredients used, to maximize both taste and health.
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  • Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer discusses the role and future of the Court in American democracy, and his book *Making Democracy Work: A Judges View*. The Supreme Court is one of the most extraordinary institutions in our system of government. Charged with the responsibility of interpreting the Constitution, the nine unelected justices of the Court have the awesome power to strike down laws enacted by our elected representatives. Why does the public accept the Court's decisions as legitimate and follow them, even when those decisions are highly unpopular? What must the Court do to maintain the public's faith? How can the Court help make our democracy work? Today we assume that when the Court rules, the public will obey. But Breyer declares that we cannot take the public's confidence in the Court for granted. He reminds us that at various moments in our history, the Court's decisions were disobeyed or ignored. And through investigations of past cases, concerning the Cherokee Indians, slavery, and Brown v. Board of Education, he brilliantly captures the steps--and the missteps--the Court took on the road to establishing its legitimacy as the guardian of the Constitution. Justice Breyer discusses what the Court must do going forward to maintain that public confidence and argues for interpreting the Constitution in a way that works in practice. He forcefully rejects competing approaches that look exclusively to the Constitution's text or to the 18th-century views of the framers. Instead, he advocates a pragmatic approach that applies unchanging constitutional values to ever-changing circumstances--an approach that will best demonstrate to the public that the Constitution continues to serve us well. The Court, he believes, must also respect the roles that other actors--such as the president, Congress, administrative agencies, and the states--play in our democracy, and he emphasizes the Court's obligation to build cooperative relationships with them. Finally, Justice Breyer examines the Court's recent decisions concerning the detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, contrasting these decisions with rulings concerning the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. He uses these cases to show how the Court can promote workable government by respecting the roles of other constitutional actors without compromising constitutional principles.
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  • Can torture ever be justified? Since 9/11 there has been an intense debate about the government’s application of torture, eavesdropping and data mining to thwart acts of terrorism. Father and son political philosophy team Charles and Gregory Fried talk about terrorism and torture with Harvard Law School professor Alan M. Dershowitz and terrorism expert Jessica Stern. When is eavesdropping acceptable? Should a kidnapper be waterboarded to reveal where his victim has been hidden? To create this seminal statement on torture and surveillance, Charles Fried and Gregory Fried have measured current controversies against the philosophies of Aristotle, Locke, Kant, and Machiavelli, and against the historic decisions, large and small, of Jefferson, Lincoln, and Pope Sixtus V, among many others. In their book *Because It Is Wrong: Torture, Privacy, and Presidential Power in the Age of Terror* they discusses the behavior and justifications of Bush government officials but also examines more broadly what should be done when high officials have broken moral and legal norms in an attempt to protect us.
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  • 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*.
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  • *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.
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  • Harold McGee, food scientist and "Curious Cook" at _The New York Times_ talks about how to cook well, even when the recipe you're following isn't perfect. McGee is joined in conversation by Rialto's award-winning chef/owner Jody Adams. *Keys to Good Cooking* directly addresses the cook at work in the kitchen and in need of quick and reliable guidance. Cookbooks past and present frequently contradict one another about the best ways to prepare foods, and many contain erroneous information and advice. *Keys to Good Cooking* distills the modern scientific understanding of cooking and translates it into immediately useful information. Looking at ingredients from the mundane to the exotic, McGee takes you from market to table, teaching, for example, how to spot the most delectable asparagus (choose thick spears); how to best prepare the vegetable (peel, dont snap, the fibrous ends; broiling is one effective cooking method for asparagus and other flat-lying vegetables); and how to present it (coat with butter or oil after cooking to avoid a wrinkled surface). This book will be a requisite countertop resource for all home chefs, as McGee's insights on kitchen safety in particular--reboil refrigerated meat or fish stocks every few days; (they're so perishable that they can spoil even in the refrigerator); don't put ice cubes or frozen gel packs on a burn; (extreme cold can cause additional skin damage)--will save even the most knowledgeable home chefs from culinary disaster. A companion volume to recipe books, a touchstone that helps cooks spot flawed recipes and make the best of them, *Keys to Good Cooking* will be of use to cooks of all kinds: to beginners who want to learn the basics, to weekend cooks who want a quick refresher in the basics, and to accomplished cooks who want to rethink a dish from the bottom up.
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  • Siddhartha Mukherjee, cancer physician and researcher, discusses his first book, *The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.* The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance, but also of hubris, paternalism, and misperception. Siddhartha Mukherjee recounts centuries of discoveries, setbacks, victories, and deaths, told through the eyes of his predecessors and peers, training their wits against an infinitely resourceful adversary that, just three decades ago, was thought to be easily vanquished in an all-out "war against cancer." From the Persian Queen Atossa, whose Greek slave cut off her malignant breast, to the nineteenth-century recipients of primitive radiation and chemotherapy to Mukherjees own leukemia patient, Carla, The Emperor of All Maladies is about the people who have soldiered through fiercely demanding regimens in order to survive--and to increase our understanding of this iconic disease.
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  • Journalist Paula Butturini talks about her new memoir *Keeping the Feast: One Couple's Story of Love, Food, and Healing in Italy*. Paula and John met in Italy, fell in love, and four years later, married in Rome. But less than a month after the wedding, tragedy struck. They had transferred from their Italian paradise to Warsaw and while reporting on an uprising in Romania, John was shot and nearly killed by sniper fire. Although he recovered from his physical wounds in less than a year, the process of healing had just begun. Unable to regain his equilibrium, he sank into a deep sadness that reverberated throughout their relationship. It was the abrupt end of what they'd known together, and the beginning of a new phase of life neither had planned for. All of a sudden, Paula was forced to reexamine her marriage, her husband, and herself. Paula began to reconsider all of her previous assumptions about healing. She discovered that sometimes patience can be a vice, anger a virtue. That sometimes it is vital to make demands of the sick, that they show signs of getting better. And she rediscovered the importance of the most fundamental of human rituals: the daily sharing of food around the family table.
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  • Walter Mosley reads from his new installment about private investigator Leonid McGill, *Known to Evil*. Leonid McGill--the protagonist introduced in *The Long Fall*--is still fighting to stick to his reformed ways while the world around him pulls him in every other direction. He has split up with his girlfriend, Aura, because his new self won't let him leave his wife--but then Aura's new boyfriend starts angling to get Leonid kicked out of his prime, top-of-the -skyscraper office space. Meanwhile, one of his sons seems to have found true love--but the girl has a shady past that is all of a sudden threatening the whole McGill family--and his other son, the charming rogue Twilliam, is doing nothing but enabling the crisis. Most ominously of all, Alfonse Rinaldo, the mysterious power-behind-the-throne at City Hall, the fixer who seems to control everything that happens in New York City, has a problem that even he can't fix--and he's come to Leonid for help. It seems a young woman has disappeared, leaving murder in her wake, and it means everything to Rinaldo to track her down. But he won't tell McGill his motives, which doesn't quite square with the new company policy--but turning down Rinaldo is almost impossible to contemplate.
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  • Former British prime minister Tony Blair discusses his new political memoir, *A Journey: My Political Life*, in conversation with noted journalist and editor Tina Brown. Tony Blair's emergence as Labour Party leader in 1994 marked a seismic shift in British politics. Within a few short years, he had transformed his party and rallied the country behind him, becoming prime minister in 1997 with the biggest victory in Labour's history, and bringing to an end 18 years of Conservative government. He took Labour to a historic three terms in office as Britain's dominant political figure of the last two decades. *A Journey* is Tony Blair's firsthand account of his years in office and beyond. Here he describes for the first time his role in shaping our recent history, from the aftermath of Princess Diana's death to the war on terror. He reveals the leadership decisions that were necessary to reinvent his party, the relationships with colleagues including Gordon Brown, the grueling negotiations for peace in Northern Ireland, the implementation of the biggest reforms to public services in Britain since 1945, and his relationships with leaders on the world stage--Nelson Mandela, Bill Clinton, Vladimir Putin, George W. Bush. He analyzes the belief in ethical intervention that led to his decisions to go to war in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, and, most controversially of all, in Iraq. Few British prime ministers have shaped the nation's course as profoundly as Tony Blair, and his achievements and legacy will be debated for years to come.
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