1. Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx
   by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
   price: $25.00
   The result of over ten years of immersion reporting, Random Family charts a tumultuous decade in which girls become mothers, mothers become grandmothers, boys become criminals, and hope struggles against deprivation. Anchoring the narrative are two love stories: the sexually charismatic nineteen-year-old Jessica's dizzying romance with a hugely successful young heroin dealer, and the naive fourteen-year-old Cocos first love with Jessica's little brother, an aspiring thug. The girls weather violence, babies, home-lessness, and the heartbreak of prison. Together, then apart, the two young couples make family where they find it: girls look for love and find trouble; boys join crews and prison gangs; children are raised by other children, grandmothers, neighbors, and friends. Astonishing in its scope, detail, and compassion, Random Family is an important journalistic achievement, sure to take its place alongside the classics of the genre.
   
   
   
2. Imagining Numbers: (Particularly the Square Root of Minus Fifteen)
   by Barry Mazur
   price: $22.00
   "Imagining Numbers" is Mazur's invitation to those who take delight in the imaginative work of reading poetry, but may have no background in math, to make a leap of the imagination in mathematics. Then he shows, step by step, how to begin imagining imaginary numbers.
   
   
   
3. The Dante Club
   by Matthew Pearl
   price: $24.95
   When a series of gruesome murders erupts in 1865, only Boston's literary elite realize that the style and form of the killings are derived from Dante's "Inferno." Twenty-six-year-old Pearl brilliantly blends fact and fiction in this debut mystery starring Oliver Wendell Holmes and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
   
   
   
4. The God of Old: Inside the Lost World of the Bible
   by James Kugel
   price: $25.00
   One of Harvard's most popular teachers has assembled evidence within the Bible that the earliest Israelites did not see God the way we do--as a distant, omnipotent being. Instead, their God was nearby and human in appearance; he inhabited a spiritual world that existed in parallel with the physical world, just out of sight.
   
   
   
5. Back Story: A Spenser Novel
   by Robert Parker
   price: $24.95
   Spenser tries to solve a 30-year-old murder as a favor to an old friend in this brilliant new mystery from the Grand Master. The lack of clues and a missing FBI intelligence report force Spenser to reach out in every direction, testing his resourcefulness and his courage.
   
   
   
6. A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide
   by Samantha Power
   price: $30.00
   Drawing upon extensive sources and interviews with Washington's top policy-makers, Power tells the story of American indifference and courage in the face of the worst massacres of the 20th century. She makes a riveting moral argument for why, as both great power and global citizen, the U.S. must renew its vigilance against genocide.
   
   
   
7. Globalization and Its Discontents
   by Joseph Stiglitz
   price: $24.95
   When it was first published, this national bestseller quickly became a touchstone in the globalization debate. Renowned economist and Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz had a ringside seat for most of the major economic events of the last decade, including stints as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and chief economist at the World Bank. Particularly concerned with the plight of the developing nations, he became increasingly disillusioned as he saw the International Monetary Fund and other major institutions put the interests of Wall Street and the financial community ahead of the poorer nations. Rarely do we get such an insider's analysis of the major institutions of globalization as in this penetrating book.
   
   
   
8. Blue Hour
   by Carolyn Forche
   price: $24.95
   "Blue Hour is an elusive book, because it is ever in pursuit of what the German poet Novalis called 'the [lost] presence beyond appearance.' The longest poem, 'On Earth,' is a transcription of mind passing from life into death, in the form of an abecedary, modeled on ancient gnostic hymns. Other poems in the book, especially 'Nocturne' and 'Blue Hour,' are lyric recoveries of the act of remembering, though the objects of memory seem to us vivid and irretrievable, the rage to summon and cling at once fierce and distracted.
   
   
   
9. Crabwalk
   by Gunter Grass
   price: $25.00
   A German cruise ship turned refugee carrier, it was attacked by a Soviet submarine in January 1945. Some 9,000 people went down in the Baltic Sea, making it the deadliest maritime disaster of all time. Born to an unwed mother on a lifeboat the night of the attack, Paul Pokriefke is a middle-aged journalist trying to piece together the tragic events. While his mother sees her whole existence in terms of that calamitous moment, Paul wishes their life could have been less touched by the past. For his teenage son, who dabbles in the dark, far-right corners of the Internet, the Gustloff embodies the denial of Germany's wartime suffering. "Scuttling backward to move forward," Crabwalk is at once a captivating tale of a tragedy at sea and a fearless examination of the ways different generations of Germans now view their past.W inner of the Nobel Prize
   
   
   
10. Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth
    by Alice Walker
    price: $22.95
    In Alice Walker's first collection of new poetry in more than a decade, the pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Color Purple and The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart affirms the power of nature and the beauty of the human spirit. These poems by "one of the best American writers of today" (The Washington Post) open us to feel, understand, and connect with what it means to be fully human. In poems that cover the range of human emotions, Absolute Trust in the goodness of the Earth Affirms the strength of the human spirit, even as it explores what it truly means to experience and absorb life.
    
    
    

1. The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: An Investigative Reporter Exposes the Truth about Corporate Cons, Globalization, and High-Finance Fraudsters
   by Greg Palast
   price: $14.00
   Investigative journalist Greg Palast has uncovered scandal, fraud, corruption, and lies in the highest seats of power—from the White House to corporate America. Known in Britain as “the greatest investigative reporter of our time” (Tribune magazine), Palast has broken some of the biggest stories of the past decade, including: How Bush killed off the FBI's investigation of the bin Laden family prior to 9/11; How the Bush family stole the election in Florida; and, How Enron cheated, lied, and swindled its way into an energy monopoly. These provocative exposés—as well as groundbreaking reports on the World Bank, the IMF, the World Trade Organization, Wal-Mart and more—are included in this collection of Palast’s most incendiary stories. Written in a no-holds-barred, in-your-face style, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy is a must-read for anyone who believes that the First Amendment is important enough to use and that democracy cannot be bought.
   
   
   
2. Bel Canto
   by Ann Patchett
   price: $13.95
   A novel that is as lyrical and profound as it is unforgettable, "Bel Canto" engenders in the reader the very passion for art and the language of music that its characters discover. A virtuoso performance by an important writer.
   
   
   
3. Nickel and Dimed
   by Barbara Ehrenreich
   price: $13.00
   A bestseller in hardcover, "Nickel and Dimed" reveals low-wage America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity. Instantly acclaimed for its insight, humor, and passion, this book is changing the way the nation perceives its working poor.
   
   
   
4. Dreaming War
   by Gore Vidal
   price: $11.95
   Vidal confronts the Cheney-Bush junta head on in a series of devastating essays that demolish the lies the American Empire lives by, unveiling a counter-history that traces the origins of America's current imperial ambitions to the experience of World War Two and the post-war Truman doctrine. And now, with the Cheney-Bush leading us into permanent war, Vidal asks whose interests are served by this doctrine of pre-emptive war? Was Afghanistan turned to rubble to avenge the 3,000 slaughtered on September 11? Or was "the unlovely Osama chosen on aesthetic grounds to be the frightening logo for our long contemplated invasion and conquest of Afghanistan?" After all he was abruptly replaced with Saddam Hussein once the Taliban were overthrown. And while "evidence" is now being invented to connect Saddam with 9/11, the current administration are not helped by "stories in the U.S. press about the vast oil wealth of Iraq which must- for the sake of the free world- be reassigned to U.S. consortiums."
   
   
   
5. Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry
   by Michael Ignatieff
   price: $12.95
   Michael Ignatieff draws on his extensive experience as a writer and commentator on world affairs to present a penetrating account of the successes, failures, and prospects of the human rights revolution. Based on the Tanner Lectures that Ignatieff delivered at Princeton University's Center for Human Values in 2000, the book includes two chapters by igantieff, an introduction by Amy Gutmann, comments by four leading scholar's--Anthony Appiah, David A. Hollinger, Thomas W. Laqueur, and Diane F. Orentlicher--and a response by Iganatieff.
   
   
   
6. Power and Terror
   by Noam Chomsky
   price: $11.95
   Power and Terror, Noam Chomsky's highly anticipated follow-up to 9-11, is drawn from a series of public talks that Chomsky gave during the spring of 2002, as well as a lengthy unpublished interview. It presents Chomsky's latest thinking on terrorism, U.S. foreign policy, and alternatives to militarism and violence as solutions to the world's problems. Chomsky challenges the United States to apply to its own actions the moral standards it demands of others, and arrives at a surprisingly optimistic conclusion rooted in his faith in the power of an informed public.
   
   
   
7. The Paradox of American Power: Why the World's Superpower Can't Go It Alone
   by Joseph S. Nye
   price: $13.95
   Nye, former assistant secretary of defense under Clinton, and current dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, offers a prescription for America's new role in the world that calls for a broader, more responsible, and cooperative relationship with the rest of the world.
   
   
   
8. Mapping Human History
   by Steve Olson
   price: $14.00
   A finalist for the National Book Award, this work follows 150,000 years of human history, tracing the origins of modern humans and the migration of our ancestors throughout the world. Maps throughout.
   
   
   
9. Gracefully Insane
   by Alex Beam
   price: $15.00
   An entertaining and poignant social history of McLean Hospital--a temporary home to many of the troubled geniuses of our age--this book explores the evolution of the treatment of mental illness from the early 19th century to today. of photos.
   
   
   
10. Why Do People Hate America?
    by Ziauddin Sardar
    price: $12.95
    An essential book for those trying to understand why America--and Americans--are targets for hate. The controversial bestseller that caused huge waves in the UK! The Indepdent calls it "required reading." Noam Chomsky says it "contains valuable information that we should know, over here, for our own good, and the world's." We call it our biggest book so far and will be backing it from day one with guranteed co-op spending, a national publicity and review blitz, talk radio bookings, various retails sales aids including postcards, and of course the usual full court press on the Web and via email.
    
    
    

* The Harvard Book Store generates a bestseller list, and ranks titles to reflect overall sales for the week March 10 - 16.

March 10 - 16, 2003 Bestseller List

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