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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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  • **All citizens are entitled to, in the words of early labor reformers, time "for what we will.”** Recent debates about inequality have focused almost exclusively on the distribution of wealth and disparities in income, but little notice has been paid to the distribution of free time. Free time is commonly assumed to be a matter of personal preference, a good that one chooses to have more or less of. Even if there is unequal access to free time, the cause and solution are presumed to lie with the resources of income and wealth. In her book _Free Time_, Julie Rose argues that these views are fundamentally mistaken. First, Rose contends that free time is a resource, like money, that one needs in order to pursue chosen ends. Further, realizing a just distribution of income and wealth is not sufficient to ensure a fair distribution of free time. Because of this, anyone concerned with distributive justice must attend to the distribution of free time. (Photo: Pixbay.com)
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  • Emmy Award–winning MSNBC news anchor Chris Hayes, author of the _New York Times_ bestselling book _Twilight of the Elites_, came to Boston for a panel discussion on inequality in America. He was joined at the Old South Church by Emerson College's Jabari Asim and Suffolk University Law School's Frank Rudy Cooper. Anthony Brooks moderated the conversation. In his latest book, _A Colony in a Nation_, Hayes argues that there are really two Americas: a colony and a nation. America likes to tell itself that it inhabits a postracial world, yet nearly every empirical measure—wealth, unemployment, incarceration, school segregation—reveals that racial inequality has barely improved since 1968, when Richard Nixon became our first “law and order” president. Hayes contends our country has fractured in two: the Colony and the Nation. In the Nation, we venerate the law. In the Colony, we obsess over order, fear trumps civil rights, and aggressive policing resembles occupation. A Colony in a Nation explains how a country founded on justice now looks like something uncomfortably close to a police state. How and why did Americans build a system where conditions in Ferguson and West Baltimore mirror those that sparked the American Revolution? Photo: By [California Department of Corrections](http://www.cdcr.ca.gov/News/background_info.html "")
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  • In this original, provocative contribution to the debate over economic inequality, Ganesh Sitaraman argues that a strong and sizable middle class is a prerequisite for America’s constitutional system. For most of Western history, Sitaraman argues, constitutional thinkers assumed economic inequality was inevitable and inescapable—and they designed governments to prevent class divisions from spilling over into class warfare. The American Constitution is different. Compared to Europe and the ancient world, America was a society of almost unprecedented economic equality, and the founding generation saw this equality as essential for the preservation of America’s republic. Over the next two centuries, generations of Americans fought to sustain the economic preconditions for our constitutional system. But today, with economic and political inequality on the rise, Sitaraman says Americans face a choice: Will we accept rising economic inequality and risk oligarchy or will we rebuild the middle class and reclaim our republic? Thumbnail: Charles Booth [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
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  • Harvard Book Store welcomes the bestselling author of Sapiens Yuval Noah Harari for a discussion of his latest book, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. Harari will be joined in conversation by Harvard's Michael Sandel, author of Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? and What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. This event is co-sponsored by the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. About Homo Deus Yuval Noah Harari, author of the critically-acclaimed New York Times bestseller and international phenomenon Sapiens, returns with an equally original, compelling, and provocative book, turning his focus toward humanity’s future, and our quest to upgrade humans into gods. Over the past century humankind has managed to do the impossible and rein in famine, plague, and war. This may seem hard to accept, but, as Harari explains in his trademark style—thorough, yet riveting—famine, plague and war have been transformed from incomprehensible and uncontrollable forces of nature into manageable challenges. For the first time ever, more people die from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals put together. The average American is a thousand times more likely to die from binging at McDonalds than from being blown up by Al Qaeda. What then will replace famine, plague, and war at the top of the human agenda? As the self-made gods of planet earth, what destinies will we set ourselves, and which quests will we undertake? Homo Deus explores the projects, dreams and nightmares that will shape the twenty-first century—from overcoming death to creating artificial life. It asks the fundamental questions: Where do we go from here? And how will we protect this fragile world from our own destructive powers? This is the next stage of evolution. This is Homo Deus. With the same insight and clarity that made Sapiens an international hit and a New York Times bestseller, Harari maps out our future. Photo Credit: Flickr/[Vector Open Stock](https://www.flickr.com/photos/freevectorstock/14565770528 "")
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  • _Systematic: How Systems Biology Is Transforming Modern Medicine_ is the first book to introduce general readers to systems biology, which is improving medical treatments and our understanding of living things. In traditional bottom-up biology, a biologist might spend years studying how a single protein works, but systems biology studies how networks of those proteins work together--how they promote health and how to remedy the situation when the system isn't functioning properly. Breakthroughs in systems biology became possible only when powerful computer technology enabled researchers to process massive amounts of data to study complete systems, and has led to progress in the study of gene regulation and inheritance, cancer drugs personalized to an individual's genetically unique tumor, insights into how the brain works, and the discovery that the bacteria and other microbes that live in the gut may drive malnutrition and obesity. Systems biology is allowing us to understand more complex phenomena than ever before. Thumbnail photo: [Walter K Schlage, Jurjen W Westra et al.](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)) via Wikimedia Commons
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  • Joel Christian Gill, John Jennings, and Mildred Louis discuss gender and color in comics. New Hampshire Institute of Art's Heide Solbrig will moderates. Presented jointly by Harvard Book Store and the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. Photo Credit: flickr/[Sam Howitz](https://www.flickr.com/photos/aloha75/8015843393 "")
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  • As Head of Communications for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, **Melissa Fleming** hears plenty of terrible stories. But in her first book, _A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea: One Refugee's Incredible Story of Love, Loss, & Survival,_ Flemming tells the story of Doaa Al Zamel, a young Syrian refugee in search of a better life. Doaa and her family leave war-torn Syria for Egypt where the climate is becoming politically unstable and increasingly dangerous. Tired of enduring harassment in Egypt, she decides to flee for Europe, joining the ranks of the thousands of refugees who make the dangerous journey across the Mediterranean on overcrowded and run-down ships to seek asylum overseas and begin a new life. After four days at sea, the boat is sunk by another boat filled with angry men shouting threats and insults. With no land in sight and surrounded by bloated, floating corpses, Doaa is adrift with a child’s inflatable water ring around her waist, while two little girls cling to her neck. Photo: [By Ggia - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0](https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45246844 "")
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  • Today it's common for a prisoner in the U.S. prison system to spend time in solitary confinement: twenty-three hours a day in featureless cells, with no visitors or human contact. Sometimes this lasts for years on end, and prisoners are held at administrators’ discretion. Keramet Reiter tells the history of one “supermax,” California’s Pelican Bay State Prison, whose extreme conditions recently sparked a statewide hunger strike by 30,000 prisoners. The product of fifteen years of research in and about prisons, this book provides essential background to a subject now drawing national attention.
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  • **George Scialabba**, author of _What Are Intellectuals Good For?_ and _Divided Mind_, joins Harvard Law School's **Randall Kennedy** for a discussion of his latest book,_ Low Dishonest Decades: Essays & Reviews 1980-2015_. _Low Dishonest Decades_ charts the thirty-five years in which income inequality has established itself in America as a fundamental problem. Scialabba's prose is thought-provoking and humane—qualities often missing from our current public discourse. Image: [Flickr](https://c2.staticflickr.com/4/3759/13906796962_94ffc39b91_b.jpg "https://c2.staticflickr.com/4/3759/13906796962_94ffc39b91_b.jpg")
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  • Harvard Book Store and Woodberry Poetry Room welcome Pulitzer Prize winner Rae Armantrout and National Book Award finalist Fanny Howe for a discussion of their latest poetry collections, _Partly: New and Selected Poems_, 2001-2015 and _The Needle's Eye: Passing through Youth_. They will be introduced by Christina Davis of the [Woodberry Poetry Room](http://hcl.harvard.edu/poetryroom/ "").
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