1. 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.
   
   
   
2. Unconquerable Word
   by Jonathan Schell
   price: $27.50
   This visionary work explores the limits of violence and charts an unexpectedly hopeful course toward a nonviolent future. Schell points the way out of the unparalleled devastation of the 20th century toward another, more peaceful path.
   
   
   
3. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood
   by Marjane Satrapi
   price: $17.95
   An intelligent and outspoken only child, Satrapi--the daughter of radical Marxists and the great-granddaughter of Iran's last emperor--bears witness to a childhood uniquely entwined with the history of her country. Illustrations.
   
   
   
4. 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.
   
   
   
5. A Short History of Nearly Everything
   by Bill Bryson
   price: $27.50
   One of the world's finest and funniest writers goes on a quest to discover the mysteries of the universe--and comprehend the fascinating, eccentric people who devote their lives to unraveling those big questions.
   
   
   
6. 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.
   
   
   
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. 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.
   
   
   
9. Isaac Newton
   by James Gleick
   price: $22.95
   From one of our foremost science writers comes a portrait of the scientific mind that glimpsed more of the truth than perhaps any other and that first articulated the essence of what we know.
   
   
   
10. Strength for the Journey
    by Peter Gomes
    price: $24.95
    With his characteristic eloquence and compassion, quoting from modern pop culture icons as well as from Scripture, Gomes offers us the tools we need to understand the wisdom of the Bible and the joy and inspiration it can bring to everyday life.
    
    
    

1. 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.
   
   
   
2. 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.
   
   
   
3. 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.
   
   
   
4. 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.
   
   
   
5. 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.
   
   
   
6. 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.
   
   
   
7. Atonement
   by Ian McEwan
   price: $14.00
   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. 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.
   
   
   
9. Blood of Victory
   by Alan Furst
   price: $12.95
   In the autumn of 1940, Russian emigre journalist I.A. Serebin is recruited in Istanbul by an agent of the British secret service for a clandestine operation to stop German importation of Romanian oil. It is a last, desperate attempt to block Hitler's conquest of Europe. Serebin's race against time begins in Bucharest and leads him to Paris, the Black Sea, Beirut, Romania, and Yugoslavia, on the trail of the oil barges full of fuel for German tanks and airplanes. Blood of Victory is replete with the heart-pounding suspense, incredible historical accuracy, and narrative immediacy we have come to expect from spymaster Alan Furst.
   
   
   
10. 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.
    
    
    

* The Harvard Book Store generates a bestseller list, and ranks titles to reflect overall sales for the week May 19 - 25.

May 19 - 25, 2003 Bestseller List

top of page