1. Who's Teaching Your Children?
   by Vivian Troen
   price: $24.95
   Many of the problems afflicting American education are the result of a critical shortage of qualified teachers in the classrooms. The teacher crisis is surprisingly resistant to current reforms and is getting worse. This important book reveals the causes underlying the crisis and offers concrete, affordable proposals for effective reform.
   
   
   
2. The Path: A One Mile Walk Through the Universe
   by Chet Raymo
   price: $21.00
   Raymo (An Intimate Look at the Night Sky), a physicist at Stonehill College, agrees with Walt Whitman that "there is a sense in which the least thing contains the all." The least things in Raymo's universe occur on a one-mile path he has walked every day for 37 years between his home and his office in North Easton, Mass. Along this path that he knows so well, he writes, "every pebble and wildflower has a story to tell"-geological stories, environmental stories, human stories.
   
   
   
3. Krakatoa
   by Simon Winchester
   price: $25.95
   On the morning of Aug. 27, 1883, the volcano Krakatoa, situated in a group of small islands between Java and Sumatra, erupted with such force that it sent tremors—both physical and otherwise—around the world. Calculated to have been the fifth most powerful volcanic blast in history, it killed, according to the official count, 36,417 people, most by the gigantic ocean waves it set in motion.
   
   
   
4. 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.
   
   
   
5. Stalin's Last Crime: The Definitive Acount of Stalin's Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953
   by Jonathan Brent
   price: $26.95
   On January 13, 1953, a stunned world learned that a vast conspiracy among Jewish doctors to murder Kremlin leaders had been unmasked. Mass arrests quickly followed. The Doctors' Plot, as this action came to be called, was Stalin's last great criminal conspiracy.
   
   
   
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. A Problem from Hell
   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.
   
   
   
8. 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.
   
   
   
9. 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.
   
   
   
10. 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."
    
    
    

1. 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.
   
   
   
2. War Talk
   by Arundhati Roy
   price: $12.00
   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. 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.
   
   
   
4. 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.
   
   
   
5. Poets Against the War
   by ed. Sam Hamill
   price: $12.95
   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. 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 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.
   
   
   
8. An Intimate Look at the Night Sky
   by Chet Raymo
   price: $16.00
   A unique star guide of 24 star maps accompanied by Raymo's essays highlighting what you can see with the naked eye throughout the year.
   
   
   
9. Mrs. Dalloway
   by Virginia Woolf
   price: $12.00
   Direct and vivid in its telling of the details of a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, the novel manages ultimately to deliver much more. It is the feelings that loom behind those daily events--the social alliances, the shopkeeper's exchange, the fact of death--that give Mrs. Dalloway texture and richness.
   
   
   
10. What Went Wrong?: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East
    by Bernard Lewis
    price: $12.95
    For centuries, the world of Islam was in the forefront of human achievement. Christian Europe, a remote land beyond its northwestern frontier, was seen as an outer darkness of barbarism and unbelief from which there was nothing to learn or to fear. And then everything changed, as the previously despised West won victory after victory, first on the battlefield and in the marketplace, then in almost every aspect of public and even private life.
    
    
    

* The Harvard Book Store generates a bestseller list, and ranks titles to reflect overall sales for the week April 14 - 20.

April 14 - 20, 2003 Bestseller List

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