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The Essential Conversation: What Parents and Teachers Can Learn from Each Other by Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot price: $24.95 Renowned Harvard professor Lawrence-Lightfoot imparts wise and useful advice on how parents and teachers can improve a child's education through the parent teacher conference--the dialogue between the most important people in a child's life. | |
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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. | |
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Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them by Al Franken price: $24.95 Once again, the author of Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations trains his subversive wit directly on the contemporary political scene, leaving the powers-that-be in tatters and his audience in hysterics. | |
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The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri price: $24.00 Expanding on her signature themes of the immigrant experience, the clash of culture, and the tangled ties of generations, Lahiri brings to her terrifically poignant first novel the remarkable powers of emotion and insight that have drawn more than half a million readers to her debut story collection. | |
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Knocking on Heaven's Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture by Mark Oppenheimer price: $30.00 What happened to American religion during the cultural revolution of the 1960s and early 1970s? The era has long been associated with the ascendancy of Eastern religions and fringe cults. But in this provocative book, Mark Oppenheimer demonstrates that contrary to conventional wisdom, most Americans did not turn on, tune in, and drop out of mainstream religious groups during the Age of Aquarius. Instead, many Americans brought the counterculture with them to their churches and temples, changing the face of American religion. | |
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Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre price: $23.00 In the town jail of Martirio, Texas--under the terrifying care of the dynastic Gurie family, and wearing only his New Jack trainers and underpants--15-year-old Vernon Little is in trouble. His friend, the mysterious Jesus, has just blown away 16 of his classmates before turning the gun on himself. | |
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Dude, Where's My Country? by Michael Moore price: $24.95 Fresh on the heels of his runaway New York Times bestselling Stupid White Men, Moore returns with a bold but hilarious act of sedition as he seeks to overthrow the "Thief in Chief" and effect the kind of grass roots change that will shake the country. | |
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Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance by Noam Chomsky price: $22.00 The United States is in the process of staking out not just the globe but the heavens as a militarized sphere of influence. Chomsky investigates how it came to this moment, what kind of peril it presents, and why rulers are willing to jeopardize the future of the species. | |
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Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder price: $25.95 At the center of this wonderful book stands Paul Farmer, a Harvard professor, a renowned infectious-disease expert and anthropologist, a man who refuses to accept conventional wisdom about what is possible and who practices more than he preaches. Moving from Harvard to Haiti, to Peru, Cuba, and Russia, Mountains Beyond Mountains reveals how change can be fostered through the story of one man doing all he can to heal the world. | |
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Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson by Gore Vidal price: $22.00 Gore Vidal, one of the master stylists of American literature and one of the most acute observers of American life and history, turns his immense literary and historiographic talent to a portrait of the formidable trio of George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. | |
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Bestselling Paperback Titles
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The Best American Short Stories 2003 by Walter Mosley price: $13.00 No other annual story collection delivers the quality, excitement, and visibility of the renowned Best American Short Stories. This year's volume surprises with selections chosen by Walter Mosley from magazines that range from Esquire to Tin House. | |
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Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides price: $15.00 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. | |
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Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri price: $13.00 Navigating between the Indian traditions they've inherited and a baffling new world, the characters in Lahiri's elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations. | |
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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. | |
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Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee price: $13.00 Set in post-apartheid Cape Town, Professor David Laurie attempts to relate to his daughter, Lucy, and to a society with new racial complexities. But that is disrupted by an afternoon of violence that changes him and his daughter in ways he could never have foreseen. | |
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The Best American Non-Required Reading 2003 by Dave Eggers price: $13.00 The debut last year of this newest addition to the Best American series was an instant hit with readers of all ages. Eggers will be editing the volume annually, choosing the finest, most interesting, and least expected fiction, nonfiction, humor, alternative comics, and more. | |
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The Cave by Jose Saramago price: $14.00 Cipriano Algor, an elderly potter, lives with his family in a small village on the outskirts of The Center, a mysterious place they are forced to contend with. Filled with the depth, humor, and the extraordinary philosophical richness that marks each of Saramago's novels, The Cave is an essential book. | |
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The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory by Brian Greene price: $15.95 In a rare blend of scientific insight and writing as elegant as the theories it explains, Brian Greene, one of the world's leading string theorists, peels away the layers of mystery surrounding string theory to reveal a universe that consists of eleven dimensions, where the fabric of space tears and repairs itself, and all matter -- from the smallest quarks to the most gargantuan supernovas -- is generated by the vibrations of microscopically tiny loops of energy. | |
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How to Be Alone: Essays by Jonathan Franzen price: $14.00 A diverse group of essays wrestling with the essential themes of Franzen's writing: the erosion of civil life and private dignity; and the hidden persistence of loneliness in postmodern, imperial America. | |
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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.
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* The Harvard Book Store generates a bestseller list, and ranks titles to reflect overall sales for the week October 27 - November 2, 2003.
October 20 - 26, 2003 Bestseller List
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