1. Appetites: Why Women Want
   by Caroline Knapp
   price: $24.00
   What do women want? Did Freud have any idea how difficult that question would become for women to answer? In Appetites, Caroline Knapp confronts that question and boldly reframes it, asking instead: How does a woman know, and then honor, what it is she wants in a culture bent on shaping, defining, and controlling women and their desires? In this, her final book, completed shortly before her death last June, turns her brilliant eye toward how a woman's appetite--for food, love, work, and pleasure--is shaped and constrained by culture.
   
   
   
2. Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas
   by Elaine Pagels
   price: $24.95
   During the last 25 years, award-winning author Pagels has been on a personal and intellectual quest to understand the origins of Christianity. In this exciting new book, she traces the source to the Gospel of Thomas.
   
   
   
3. Sappho's Leap
   by Erica Jong
   price: $24.95
   Fearless, exuberant, and passionate, Sappho is Erica Jong's most unforgettable heroine. Sappho's Leap is a Journey back 2,600 years to inhabit the mind of the greatest love poet the world has ever known. At the age of fourteen, Sappho is seduced by the beautiful poet Alcaeus, plots with him to overthrow the dictator of their island, and is caught and married off to a repellent older man in hopes that matrimony will keep her out of trouble. Instead, it starts her off on a series of amorous adventures with both men and women, taking her from Delphi to Egypt, and even to the Land of the Amazons and the shadowy realm of Hades.
   
   
   
4. The Crimson Letter: Harvard, Homosexuality and the Shaping of American Culture
   by Douglass Shand-Tucci
   price: $27.95
   What Shand-Tucci attempts here is nothing less than a re-evaluation of American culture by looking at how it was shaped by Harvard-connected gay men. From Ralph Waldo Emerson (in love with fellow student Martin Gay) and Henry James (who apparently first had sex with Oliver Wendell Holmes) to poet Frank O'Hara and artist Edward Gory, who were student roommates, Shand-Tucci weaves together history, criticism and gossip to show how many of the sons of Harvard were not only gay but major culture machers.
   
   
   
5. Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor
   by Eric Schlosser
   price: $23.00
   Schlosser, author of "Fast Food Nation," offers an unprecedented view of the nexus of ingenuity, greed, high-mindedness, and hypocrisy that is American culture. He reveals the vast and fascinating workings of the shadow economy by focusing on marijuana, pornography, and illegal migrant workers.
   
   
   
6. Good Faith
   by Jane Smiley
   price: $26.00
   From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres comes a masterly novel about some very American seductions: money, sex, and real estate. "Good Faith" is an extraordinary story about ordinary people caught up in the exotic 1980s version of the American Dream, as greed and financial game-playing explode on Main Street.
   
   
   
7. The Peloponnesian War
   by Donald Kagan
   price: $29.95
   The great rivalry between the Greek city-states of Athens and Sparta developed into a war of unprecedented brutality that lasted from 431-404 B.C.. The conflict not only caused widespread death and destruction of property but also reversed the growth of democracy in Athens and other states under its influence, bringing about the collapse of what human beings have regarded as the foundations of civilization. For centuries, scholars, military leaders and diplomats have studied the complex series of machinations employed to keep the struggle going and have used them to illuminate events in their own time.
   
   
   
8. An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963
   by Robert Dalleck
   price: $30.00
   An Unfinished Life is the first major, single-volume life of John F. Kennedy to be written by a historian in nearly four decades. Drawing upon previously unavailable material and never-before-opened archives to tell Kennedy's story. We learn for the first time just how sick Kennedy was, what medications he took, which he concealed from all but a few, and how severely his medical condition affected his actions as President. We learn for the first time the real story of how Bobby was selected as Attorney General. Dallek reveals exactly what Jacks father did to help his election to the presidency, and he follows previously unknown evidence to show what path JFK would have taken in the Vietnam entanglement had he survived.
   
   
   
9. 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.
   
   
   
10. Emerson
    by Lawrence Buell
    price: $29.95
    Both an introduction and a fresh contribution to the scholarly literature, Emerson offers a fresh, timely, readable reinterpretation of Emerson's career and significance at the historic moment of his bicentennial.
    
    
    

1. The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency
   by Alexander McCall Smith
   price: $11.95
   Combining a wonderfully satisfying reimagination of the mystery with a classic novel of Africa in the tradition of Isak Dinesen, The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency tells the story of Precious Ramotswe, a delightfully cunning and a profoundly moral woman who is drawn to her profession to "help people with problems in their lives." Immediately upon setting up shop in a small storefront in Gaborone, she is hired to track down a missing husband, uncover a con man, and follow a wayward daughter. But the case that tugs at her heart is a missing eleven-year-old boy, who may have been snatched by evil witchdoctors.
   
   
   
2. Three Junes
   by Julia Glass
   price: $14.00
   Told in three intertwined novellas, Three Junes spans Greece, Scotland, and New York to bring the reader into the fold of one memorable Scottish family. Advertising. Author tour. National Book Award Winner.
   
   
   
3. Granta 81: The Best of the Young British Novelists
   ed. Ian Jack
   price: $14.95
   Contributors to the first two volumes in the "Granta" series include six Booker Award winners and nine recipients of the Whitbread Award. This is a collection of their writings.
   
   
   
4. White Teeth
   by Zadie Smith
   price: $14.00
   At the center of this invigorating and hilarious novel are two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal, hapless veterans of World War II. Set against London's racial and cultural tapestry, venturing across the former empire's past as it barrels toward the future, "White Teeth" is an international bestseller now available in paperback.
   
   
   
5. Everything Is Illuminated
   by Jonathan Safran Foer
   price: $13.95
   A writer journeys to the farmlands of eastern Europe to find Augustine, the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Passionate and marked by an indelible humanity, "Everything Is Illuminated" mines the black holes of history and is ultimately a story about searching: for people and places that no longer exist and for the tales that link past and future.
   
   
   
6. 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.
   
   
   
7. Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician
   by Anthony Everitt
   price: $14.95
   Brilliant, voluble, cranky, a genius of political manipulation but also a true patriot and idealist, Cicero was Rome's most feared politician, one of the greatest lawyers and statesmen of all times. Machiavelli, Queen Elizabeth, John Adams and Winston Churchill all studied his example. No man has loomed larger in the political history of mankind. In this dynamic and engaging biography, Anthony Everitt plunges us into the fascinating, scandal-ridden world of ancient Rome in its most glorious heyday.
   
   
   
8. The Secret Life of Bees
   by Sue Monk Kidd
   price: $14.00
   Now in paperback comes the intoxicating debut novel of "one motherless daughter's discover of . . . the strange and wondrous places we find love" ("The Washington Post"). A bestseller in hardcover, Sue Monk Kidd's ravishing work is set in South Carolina in 1964. A movie version is forthcoming from Fox Searchlight.
   
   
   
9. What Went Wrong?
   by Bernard Lewis
   price: $12.95
   In this landmark volume, an authority on the Middle East examines the anguished reaction of the Islamic world as it tries to understand why things have changed, how they have been overtaken, overshadowed, and to an increasing extent dominated by the West. 15 illustrations. Map.
   
   
   
10. Writer's Block: Ideas to Jump-Start Your Imagination
    by Jason Rekulak
    price: $9.95
    Is inspiration running low? Is the muse out to lunch? Many creative types are anxious to write The Great American Novel but don't know where to begin. Help is on the way with "The Writer's Block"! Just open this block-sized book to any page and, find an exercise or advice from a legendary or contemporary author -- everyone from Edith Wharton and Ernest Hemingway to John Irving, Barbara Kingsolver, David Sedaris, Toni Morrison, Richard Ford, Anne Tyler, and many, many others. Includes more than 200 photographs.
    
    
    

* The Harvard Book Store generates a bestseller list, and ranks titles to reflect overall sales for the week May 12 - 18.

May 12 - 18, 2003 Bestseller List

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