1. Regarding the Pain of Others
   by Susan Sontag
   price: $20.00
   In her first full-scale investigation of the rote of imagery in our culture since her now-classic book On Photography defined the terms of the debate twenty-five years ago, Susan Sontag cuts through circular arguments about how pictures can inspire dissent or foster violence as she takes a fresh look at the representation of atrocity -- from Goya's The Disasters of War to photographs of the American Civil War, lynchings of blacks in the South, and Dachau and Auschwitz, to contemporary horrific images of Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, and New York City on September 11, 2001.
   
   
   
2. Khrushchev: The Man and His Era
   by William Taubman
   price: $35.00
   Nikita Khrushchev was one of the most complex and important political figures of the twentieth century. Ruler of the Soviet Union during the first decade after Stalin's death, Khrushchev left a contradictory stamp on his country and on the world. His life and career mirror the Soviet experience: revolution, civil war, famine, collectivization, industrialization, terror, world war, cold war, Stalinism, post-Stalinism. Complicit in terrible Stalinist crimes, Khrushchev nevertheless retained his humanity: his daring attempt to reform communism prepared the ground for its eventual collapse; and his awkward efforts to ease the cold war triggered its most dangerous crises.
   
   
   
3. Middlesex
   by Jeffrey Eugenides
   price: $27.00
   Spanning eight decades, Eugenides's long-awaited second novel is a grand, utterly original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire. Eugenides was named one of America's best young novelists by both "Granta" and "The New Yorker."
   
   
   
4. After Jihad
   by Noah Feldman
   price: $24.00
   Proposing that Islamic democracy is viable and desirable, a scholar of Islamic thought surveys the intellectual and geopolitical terrain of the contemporary Muslim world, and proposes that Islamic democracy is indeed viable and desirable, and that the West, particularly the United States, should work to bring it about, not suppress it.
   
   
   
5. The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox: Mending the Gap Between Science and the Humanities
   by Stephen Jay Gould
   price: $25.95
   For the metaphor of cunning versus persistence that runs through this title, Gould refers to the 7th century B.C., when the Greek soldier-poet Archilochus said that "the fox devises many strategies; the hedgehog knows one great and effective strategy." This heavyweight work—sure to delight and challenge the intellectual community—comes from a writer who refused to dumb down his material. Even the slightest inaccuracy resulting from oversimplification "destroys integrity and places an author upon a slippery slope of no return," Gould once wrote. His last work is a scholarly farewell from one of the most gifted thinkers of this or any other generation.
   
   
   
6. On the Natural History of Destruction
   by W. G. Sebald
   price: $23.95
   During World War Two, 131 German cities and towns were targeted by Allied bombs, a good number almost entirely flattened. Six hundred thousand German civilians died; seven and a half million were left homeless. Yet despite the staggering scale of the devastation, Germans have maintained an astonishing silence on the subject to this day.
   
   
   
7. Coming of Age as a Poet
   by Helen Vendler
   price: $22.95
   With characteristic precision, authority, and grace, Vendler helps readers to appreciate the conception and practice of poetry as she explores four poets and their first "perfect" works. 4 halftones.
   
   
   
8. The DaVinci 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.
   
   
   
9. Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor
   by Paul Farmer
   price: $27.50
   Pathologies of Power uses harrowing stories of life--and death--in extreme situations to interrogate our understanding of human rights. Paul Farmer, a physician and anthropologist with twenty years of experience working in Haiti, Peru, and Russia, argues that promoting the social and economic rights of the world's poor is the most important human rights struggle of our times.
   
   
   
10. Positively Fifth Street
    by James McManus
    price: $26.00
    James McManus was sent to Las Vegas by Harper’s to cover the World Series of Poker in 2000, especially the mushrooming progress of women in the $23 million event, and the murder of Ted Binion, the tournament’s prodigal host, purportedly done in by a stripper and her boyfriend with a technique so outré it took a Manhattan pathologist to identify it. Whether a jury would convict the attractive young couple was another story altogether.
    
    
    

1. Atonement
   by Ian McEwan
   price: $14.00
   McEwan, Booker Prize-winning author of "Amsterdam, " has created a symphonic novel of love and war, childhood and class, guilt and forgiveness that provides all the satisfaction of a brilliant narrative combined with the provocation readers have come to expect from this master of English prose.
   
   
   
2. Globalization and Its Discontents
   by Joseph Stiglitz
   price: $15.95
   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.
   
   
   
3. The Life of Pi
   by Yann Martel
   price: $14.00
   The son of a zookeeper, Pi Patel has an encyclopedic knowledge of animal behavior and a fervent love of stories. When Pi is sixteen, his family emigrates from India to North America aboard a Japanese cargo ship, along with their zoo animals bound for new homes. The ship sinks. Pi finds himself alone in a lifeboat, his only companions a hyena, an orangutan, a wounded zebra, and Richard Parker, a 450-pound Bengal tiger.
   
   
   
4. 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.
   
   
   
5. 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.
   
   
   
6. The Darwin Awards II
   by Wendy Northcutt
   price: $11.00
   The bestselling phenomenon returns with a hilarious new compendium of mishaps, misadventures, and fatal missteps that show once again how far we've climbed the evolutionary food chain.
   
   
   
7. 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."
   
   
   
8. The Hours
   by Michael Cunningham
   price: $13.00
   The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel becomes a motion picture starring Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, and Nicole Kidman, directed by Stephen Daldry from a screenplay by David Hare"The Hours tells the story of three women: Virginia Woolf, beginning to write Mrs. Dalloway as she recuperates in a London suburb with her husband in 1923; Clarissa Vaughan, beloved friend of an acclaimed poet dying from AIDS, who in modern-day New York is planning a party in his honor; and Laura Brown, in a 1949 Los Angeles suburb, who slowly begins to feel the constraints of a perfect family and home. By the end of the novel, these three stories intertwine in remarkable ways, and finally come together in an act of subtle and haunting grace.
   
   
   
9. 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.
   
   
   
10. Who Owns History?: Rethinking the Past in a Changing World
    by Eric Foner
    price: $13.00
    In Who Owns History?, Eric Foner proposes his answer to these and other questions about the historian's relationship to the world of the past and future. He reconsiders his own earlier ideas and those of the pathbreaking Richard Hofstadter. He also examines international changes during the past two decades--globalization, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of apartheid in South Africa--and their effects on historical consciousness. He concludes with considerations of the enduring, but often misunderstood, legacies of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. This is a provocative, even controversial, study of the reasons we care about history--or should.
    
    
    

* The Harvard Book Store generates a bestseller list, and ranks titles to reflect overall sales for the week April 7 - 13.

April 7 - 13, 2003 Bestseller List

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