1. Turning the Mind into an Ally
   by Sakyong Mipham
   price: $23.95
   Having grown up American with a Tibetan influence, Mipham speaks to Westerners as no one can: relating stories and wisdom from American culture and the great Buddhist teachers in idiomatic English. Strengthening, calming, and stabilizing the mind is the essential first step in accomplishing nearly any goal. This book's message makes it possible for anyone to succeed.
   
   
   
2. 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.
   
   
   
3. Stupid White Men
   by Michael Moore
   price: $24.95
   Moore sizes up the new century--and that big, ugly special-interest group that's laying waste to the world as we know it: stupid white men. Whether he's calling for United Nations action to overthrow the Bush Family Junta or praying that Jesse Helms will get kissed by a man, "Stupid White Men" is Mike's "Manifesto on Malfeasance and Mediocrity."
   
   
   
4. The Newsboys' Lodging House
   by Jon Boorstin
   price: $24.95
   William James, psychologist, philosopher, and one of the founding fathers of modern American thought, was thirty years old when he suffered a devastating mental collapse. Suicidal, unable to work, eat or sleep, James became obsessed with the question of evil. Months later he emerged from the hospital with a surer sense of self and a profound clarity of purpose. No one knows what happened during that time as forty-two pages had been cut out of his diary...This story is a vivid and thrilling "what-if" novel plunges one of America's great thinkers into the gritty, legendary street life of 1870 New York City.
   
   
   
5. Jarhead
   by Anthony Swofford
   price: $24.00
   When the Marines--or "jarheads" as they call themselves--are sent to Saudi Arabia to fight the Iraqis, Swofford is there, with a 100-pound pack on his shoulders and a sniper's rifle in his hands. In this powerful memoir, he weaves his war experience with vivid accounts of boot camp, reflections on the mythos of the Marines, and remembrances of battles with lovers and family.
   
   
   
6. 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.
   
   
   
7. Our Final Hour: The Threat to Humanity's Survival
   by Martin Rees
   price: $25.00
   A scientist known for unraveling the complexities of the universe over millions of years, Sir Rees now warns that humankind is potentially the maker of its own demise--and that of the cosmos. With clarity and precision, he maps out the ways technology could destroy the species and foreclose the potential of a living universe whose evolution has just begun.
   
   
   
8. The Future of Freedom
   by Fareed Zakaria
   price: $24.95
   Democracy has reshaped politics, economics, and culture around the world. This provocative book asks, can you have too much of a good thing? Today we judge the value of every idea, institution, and individual by one test: is it popular? Or, more practically, do the majority of those polled like it? This transformation has affected not just politics but also business, law, culture, and even religion. Every institution and profession in society must democratize or die. Democracy has gone from being a form of government to a way of life.
   
   
   
9. The Da Vinci Code
   by Dan Brown
   price: $24.95
   In an exhilarating blend of scholarly intelligence, relentless adventure, and cutting wit, Robert Langdon (first introduced in "Angels Demons") and his new adventure combines the punch of Robert Ludlum, the intriguing historical touch of Umberto Eco, and the nonstop suspense of Michael Crichton. In this explosively original thriller, a world-renowned expert in cracking ancient codes and riddles deciphers a mind-bending series of clues embedded in works of Leonardo da Vinci, and uncovers a secret that changes history.
   
   
   
10. Reading Lolita in Tehran
    by Azar Nafisi
    price: $23.95
    "Reading Lolita in Tehran" is the astonishing true story of young women who met in secret each week to read and talk about forbidden Western classics--and their lives and loves--in the Islamic Republic of Iran. This book transcends categorization as memoir, literary criticism or social history, though it is superb as all three. Literature professor Nafisi returned to her native Iran after a long education abroad, remained there for some 18 years, and left in 1997 for the United States, where she now teaches at Johns Hopkins.
    
    
    

1. 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.
   
   
   
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. The Nanny Diaries
   by Emma McLaughlin
   price: $13.95
   With more than 650,000 copies currently in print and atop bestseller lists nationwide, Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus' biting satire of the glamorous life on Manhattan's Upper East Side offers both an insider's view and a great read to puncture the glamour of Manhattan's upper class, and reveal the truth behind the Park Avenue veneer. Struggling to graduate from New York University and afford her microscopic studio apartment, Nanny takes a job caring for the only son of the wealthy X family. She rapidly learns the insane amount of juggling involved in ensuring that a Park Avenue wife who doesn't work, cook, clean, or raise her own child has a smooth day.
   
   
   
4. Why Do People Hate America?
   by Ziauddin Sardar
   price: $12.95
   Nearly two years later, we are still searching for answers. In Why Do People Hate America?, a huge bestseller in the UK, journalists Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies finally give us some. With probing honesty they examine how, as the world’s only superpower, the US blindly exerts its muscular influence in developing countries—often to the detriment of traditional cultures, and heedless of its impact on the poor and indigenous. Discussing everything from the corrosive influence of McDonald’s to the pillaging of biotechnology corporations, as well as the influence of shows like The West Wing and our own double standard in foreign policy, Why Do People Hate America? is a brilliant challenge to orthodox views, and an invitation for us to begin looking beyond our borders.
   
   
   
5. 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."
   
   
   
6. Pirates & Emperors, Old & New: International Terrorism in the Real World
   by Noam Chomsky
   price: $18.00
   The most up-to-date reflections on international terrorism by America's leading dissident, Noam Chomsky. This updated edition of Noam Chomsky's classic dissection of terrorism explores the role of the U.S. in the Middle East, and reveals how the media manipulates public opinion about what constitutes "terrorism." This edition includes new chapters covering the second Palestinian intifada that began in October 2000; an analysis of the impact of September 11 on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East; a deconstruction of depictions and perceptions of terrorism since that date; as well as the original sections on Iran and the U.S. bombing of Libya.
   
   
   
7. Understanding Power
   by Noam Chomsky
   price: $19.95
   Noam Chomsky is universally accepted as one of the preeminent public intellectuals of the modern era. In a series of enlightening and wide-ranging discussions, all published here for the first time, Chomsky radically reinterprets the events of the past three decades, covering topics from foreign policy during Vietnam to the decline of welfare under the Clinton administration. And as he elucidates the connection between America's imperialistic foreign policy and the decline of domestic social services, Chomsky also discerns the necessary steps to take toward social change. With an eye to political activism and the media's role in popular struggle, as well as U.S. foreign and domestic policy, Understanding Power offers a sweeping critique of the world around us and is definitive Chomsky.
   
   
   
8. Le Divorce
   by Diane Johnson
   price: $12.95
   In the grand tradition of Edith Wharton, Le Divorce delightfully recounts the adventures of two sisters from California who make a modern pilgrimage to Paris, the City of Light. "Sexy, graceful, and funny". -New York Review of Books
   
   
   
9. Fast Food Nation
   by Eric Schlosser
   price: $13.95
   In this provocative exposé Schlosser, an award-winning contributor to the Atlantic Monthly, goes behind the scenes of the nation's fast food chains, where he makes some distinctly unappetizing discoveries. Beginning with Harlan Sanders and the McDonald brothers, founders of the fast food phenomenon, Schlosser examines the repercussions of the industry on the nation's economy and health. From factory farms that raise potatoes and beef, to meatpacking plants that operate with little federal oversight, he makes a thorough tour of an industry characterized by unsanitary procedures and oppressive working conditions. Schlosser also offers a fascinating look at the flavor companies that - literally - shape our tastes. Full of keen commentary, disturbing research and compelling interviews, this unforgettable indictment of fast food culture, reminiscent of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, is sure to make readers rethink their next trip to the drive-through.
   
   
   
10. Guns, Germs & Steel
    by Jared Diamond
    price: $16.95
    In this "artful, informative, and delightful (book)" ("New York Review of Books"), Diamond offers a convincing explanation of the way the modern world came to be and stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history. Photos.
    
    
    

* The Harvard Book Store generates a bestseller list, and ranks titles to reflect overall sales for the week March 24 - 30.

March 24 - 30, 2003 Bestseller List

top of page