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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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Ian Frazier - Hogs Wild: Selected Reporting Pieces

Mon, Jun 13, 2016

In his latest book, _Hogs Wild: Selected Reporting Pieces_, **Ian Frazier** assembles a decade's worth of his finest essays and reportage, and demonstrates the irrepressible passions and artful digressions that distinguish his enduring body of work. Part muckraker, part adventurer, and part raconteur, Frazier beholds, captures, and reimagines the spirit of the American experience. He travels down South to examine feral hogs, and learns that their presence in any county is a strong indicator that it votes Republican. He introduces us to a man who, when his house is hit by a supposed meteorite, hopes to "leverage" the space object into opportunity for his family, and a New York City police detective who is fascinated with rap-music-related crimes. Alongside Frazier's delight in the absurdities of contemporary life is his sense of social responsibility: there's an echo of the great reform-minded writers in his pieces on a soup kitchen, opioid overdose deaths on Staten Island, and the rise in homelessness in New York City under Mayor Bloomberg. Frazier discusses how _Hogs Wild_ unearths the joys of inquiry without agenda, curiosity without calculation.

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Janna Levin: Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space

Wed, Jun 29, 2016

Award-winning author and theoretical astrophysicist **Janna Levin** discusses her latest book, _Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space_ —the authoritative story of the headline-making discovery of gravitational waves. **Janna Levin** recounts the fascinating story of the obsessions, the aspirations, and the trials of the scientists who embarked on an arduous, fifty-year endeavor to capture these elusive waves. As this book was written, two massive instruments of remarkably delicate sensitivity were brought to advanced capability. As the book draws to a close, five decades after the experimental ambition began, the team races to intercept a wisp of a sound with two colossal machines, hoping to succeed in time for the centenary of Einstein’s most radical idea. **Janna Levin’s** absorbing account of the surprises, disappointments, achievements, and risks in this unfolding story offers a portrait of modern science that is unlike anything seen before. (Photo: [LIGO](https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/video/ligo20160615v1 ""))

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Chuck Klosterman: But What If We're Wrong?

Thu, Jun 9, 2016

We live in a culture of casual certitude. This has always been the case, no matter how often that certainty has failed. Though no generation believes there's nothing left to learn, every generation unconsciously assumes that what has already been defined and accepted is (probably) pretty close to how reality will be viewed in perpetuity. And then, of course, time passes. Ideas shift. Opinions invert. What once seemed reasonable eventually becomes absurd, replaced by modern perspectives that feel even more irrefutable and secure - until, of course, they don't. In _But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past_ (2016), **Chuck Klosterman** visualizes the contemporary world as it will appear to those who will perceive it as the distant past. Klosterman asks questions that are profound in their simplicity: How certain are we about our understanding of gravity? How certain are we about our understanding of time? What will be the defining memory of rock music, five hundred years from today? How seriously should we view the content of our dreams? How seriously should we view the content of television? Are all sports destined for extinction? Is it possible that the greatest artist of our era is currently unknown (or, weirder still, widely known, but entirely disrespected)? Is it possible that we "overrate" democracy? And perhaps most disturbing, is it possible that we've reached the end of knowledge? Kinetically slingshotting through a broad spectrum of objective and subjective problems, _But What If We’re Wrong?_ is built on interviews with a variety of creative thinkers, interwoven with high-wire humor and nontraditional analysis. It's a seemingly impossible achievement: a book about the things we cannot know, explained as if we did. It's about how we live now, once "now" has become "then." (Photo: [Flickr/92YTribeca](https://www.flickr.com/photos/92ytribeca/5557300874/in/photolist-zsQmz-nVwa9-9AjGs5-Stbsv-GYg77-GYfVs-9AgKja-9AjGA1-9AgKrK-9AjGv5-9t2CdP-nJwqi-9AjGjJ-9t5BV9-9AjGfm-9t5BRb-9t5BWj-9AjGCQ-9AjGyu-9t2C68-9AgKxp-9AjGBo-MR839-9AjGCh-nEc9H-9AgKgv-9AjGEN-9AgKDM-9AjGHb-9AjGFs-9AgKxR-3oQPGK-7LArLk-S9wQi-51C35q-7XXiP-9AjGsq-7wZxrQ-9t2C9t-2nDbWe-BoVhp-KKxmD-pS2YS "Chuck Klosterman cover"), image cropped)

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Yaa Gyasi: Homegoing

Fri, Jun 10, 2016

**Yaa Gyasi** reads from her debut novel, _Homegoing: A Novel_ (2016), a novel of breathtaking sweep and emotional power that traces three hundred years in Ghana and, along the way, also becomes a truly great American novel. Extraordinary for its exquisite language, its implacable sorrow, its soaring beauty, and for its monumental portrait of the forces that shape families and nations, _Homegoing_ heralds the arrival of a major new voice in contemporary fiction. In the novel, two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Unbeknownst to Effia, her sister, Esi, is imprisoned beneath her in the castle's dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast's booming slave trade, and shipped off to America, where her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery. One thread of _Homegoing_ follows Effia's descendants through centuries of warfare in Ghana, as the Fante and Asante nations wrestle with the slave trade and British colonization. The other thread follows Esi and her children into America. From the plantations of the South to the Civil War and the Great Migration, from the coal mines of Pratt City, Alabama, to the jazz clubs and dope houses of twentieth-century Harlem, right up through the present day, _Homegoing_ makes history visceral and captures, with singular and stunning immediacy, how the memory of captivity came to be inscribed in the soul of a nation. Generation after generation, Yaa Gyasi's magisterial first novel sets the fate of the individual against the obliterating movements of time, delivering unforgettable characters whose lives were shaped by historical forces beyond their control. (Photo: Kurt Dundy CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons)

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Malcolm K. Sparrow: What Holds Policing Back and the Keys to Reform

Fri, May 20, 2016

The police shooting of an unarmed young black man in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014 sparked riots and the beginning of a national conversation on race and policing. Much of the ensuing discussion has focused on the persistence of racial disparities and the extraordinarily high rate at which American police kill civilians (an average of roughly three per day). Malcolm Sparrow, who teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School and is a former British police detective, argues that other factors in the development of police theory and practice over the last twenty-five years have also played a major role in contributing to these tragedies and to a great many other cases involving excessive police force and community alienation. Sparrow shows how the core ideas of community and problem-solving policing have failed to thrive. In many police departments these foundational ideas have been reduced to mere rhetoric. The result is heavy reliance on narrow quantitative metrics, where police define how well they are doing by tallying up traffic tickets issued (Ferguson), or arrests made for petty crimes (in New York). (Photo: [Tobin B./Flickr](https://www.flickr.com/photos/tobanblack/3762525969 ""))

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Policing The Black Community: Consequences And Activism

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Negin Farsad: How to Make White People Laugh

Fri, Jun 3, 2016

**Negin Farsad** is an Iranian-American-Muslim female stand-up comedian who believes she can change the world through jokes. And yes, sometimes that includes fart jokes. Discussing her candid and uproarious memoir, _How to Make White People Laugh_ (2016), Farsad shares her personal experiences growing up as the "other" in an American culture that has no time for nuance. In fact, she longed to be black and/or Mexican at various points of her youth, you know, like normal kids. (Right? RIGHT?) Writing bluntly and hilariously about the elements of race we are often too politically correct to discuss, Farsad takes a long hard look at the iconography that still shapes our concepts of "black," "white," and "Muslim" today - and what it means when white culture defines the culture. She asks the important questions: What does it mean to have a hyphenated identity? How can we actually combat racism, stereotyping, and exclusion? Do Iranians get bunions at a higher rate than other ethnic groups? (She's asking for a friend.) In _How to Make White People Laugh_, Farsad tackles these questions with wit, humor, and incisive intellect. Along the way, she just might teach readers a thing or two about tetherball, _Duck Dynasty_, and wine slushies. (Photo: [Flickr/TED Conference](https://www.flickr.com/photos/tedconference/18057607460/in/photolist-tvFXzE-DegHCD-tNhijk-tMWZdq-2zT5TP-4yfeQu-rkT9QM-4xeed2-E31tJH-DJ8Brj-DBLsN4-EbfEiB-DZPmTU-sRrn4e-sRrmMx-tNoLKX-GQ9Xz3-Hctwwj "Flickr Negin Farsad"), image cropped)

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Valiant Ambition: Washington, Arnold, and the American Revolution

Sun, May 15, 2016

in September 1776, the vulnerable Continental Army under an unsure George Washington (who had never commanded a large force in battle) evacuates New York after a devastating defeat by the British Army. Three weeks later, near the Canadian border, one of his favorite generals, Benedict Arnold, miraculously succeeds in postponing the British naval advance down Lake Champlain that might have ended the war. Four years later, as the book ends, Washington has vanquished his demons and Arnold has fled to the enemy after a foiled attempt to surrender the American fortress at West Point to the British. After four years of war, America is forced to realize that the real threat to its liberties might not come from without but from within. _Valiant Ambition_ is a complex, controversial, and dramatic portrait of a people in crisis and the war that gave birth to a nation. The focus is on loyalty and personal integrity, evoking a Shakespearean tragedy that unfolds in the key relationship of Washington and Arnold, who is an impulsive but sympathetic hero whose misfortunes at the hands of self-serving politicians fatally destroy his faith in the legitimacy of the rebellion. As a country wary of tyrants suddenly must figure out how it should be led, Washington’s unmatched ability to rise above the petty politics of his time enables him to win the war that really matters.

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Angela Duckworth on Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

Wed, May 4, 2016

Why do some people succeed and others fail? Sharing new insights from her landmark research, **Angela Duckworth** explains why talent is hardly a guarantor of success. Rather, the secret to outstanding achievement is not talent but a focused persistence called "grit." To succeed, we must identify our passions and follow through on our commitments. Drawing on her own powerful story as the daughter of a scientist who frequently bemoaned her lack of smarts, Duckworth describes her winding path through teaching, business consulting, and neuroscience, which led to the hypothesis that what really drives success is not "genius" but a special blend of passion and long-term perseverance. As a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Duckworth created her own "character lab" and set out to test her theory. In _Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance_ (2016), she takes readers into the field to visit teachers working in some of the toughest schools, cadets struggling through their first days at West Point, and young finalists in the National Spelling Bee. She also mines fascinating insights from history and shows what can be gleaned from modern experiments in peak performance. Finally, she shares what she's learned from interviewing dozens of high achievers — from JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon to the cartoon editor of The New Yorker to Seattle Seahawks Coach Pete Carroll. Angela Duckworth discusses her book with Harvard Business School professor **Amy Cuddy**. _Grit_ is about what goes through your head when you fall down, and how that - not talent or luck - makes all the difference.

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Sidney Blumenthal on A Self-Made Man: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, 1809-1849

Fri, May 13, 2016

_A Self-Made Man: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, 1809-1849_ (2016) is the first of a multi-volume history of Lincoln as a political genius - from his obscure beginnings to his presidency, his assassination, and the overthrow of his post-Civil War dreams of Reconstruction. In this first volume, which he discusses at Harvard Book Store, **Sidney Blumenthal** traces Lincoln from his painful youth to his emergence as the man we know as Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln's anti-slavery thinking began in his childhood amidst the Primitive Baptist antislavery dissidents in backwoods Kentucky and Indiana, the roots of his repudiation of Southern Christian pro-slavery theology. Intensely ambitious, he held political aspirations from his earliest years. Obsessed with Stephen Douglas, his political rival, he battled him for decades. Successful as a circuit lawyer, Lincoln built his team of loyalists. Blumenthal reveals how Douglas and Jefferson Davis acting together made possible Lincoln’s rise. While depicting the successful politician, Blumenthal also describes a socially awkward suitor who had a nervous breakdown over his inability to deal with the opposite sex. Lincoln's marriage to the upper-class Mary Todd was crucial to his social aspirations and his political career. Blumenthal portrays Mary as an asset to her husband, a rare woman of her day with strong political opinions. Blumenthal's robust portrayal is based on prodigious research of Lincoln's record and of the period and its main players. The book reflects both Lincoln's time and the struggle that consumes our own political debate. (Photo: Ian Manka (Own work) [[CC BY 3.0](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0 "CC License")], via [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lincoln_Home.jpg "Lincoln Home"), image cropped) By Ian Manka (Contact me at the English Wikipedia, en:User:IanManka) (Own work) [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

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Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble

Wed, Apr 6, 2016

For twenty-five years **Dan Lyons** was a magazine writer at the top of his profession—until one Friday morning when he received a phone call: Poof. His job no longer existed. "I think they just want to hire younger people," his boss at Newsweek told him. Fifty years old and with a wife and two young kids, Dan was, in a word, screwed. Then an idea hit. Dan had long reported on Silicon Valley and the tech explosion. Why not join it? HubSpot, a Boston start-up, was flush with $100 million in venture capital. They offered Dan a pile of stock options for the vague role of "marketing fellow." What could go wrong? HubSpotters were true believers: They were making the world a better place . . . by selling email spam. The office vibe was frat house meets cult compound: The party began at four thirty on Friday and lasted well into the night; "shower pods" became hook-up dens; a push-up club met at noon in the lobby, while nearby, in the "content factory," Nerf gun fights raged. Groups went on "walking meetings," and Dan's absentee boss sent cryptic emails about employees who had "graduated" (read: been fired). In the middle of all this was Dan, exactly twice the age of the average HubSpot employee, and literally old enough to be the father of most of his co-workers, sitting at his desk on his bouncy-ball "chair."

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