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Harvard Book Store's collection of the best books of 2003 --
all discounted 20% for the holiday season.

American Studies: Essays
by Louis Menand
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
$14.00 / $11.20

From the author of The Metaphysical Club comes a major collection of essays on American art, American thought, and American life. At each step of this journey through American history, Louis Menand has an original point to make: he explains the real significance of William James's nervous breakdown, and of the anti-Semitism in T. S. Eliot's writing. He reveals the reasons for the remarkable commercial successes of William Shawn's New Yorker and William Paley's CBS. He talks to Al Gore in the White House when the Starr Report is released, and to Maya Lin soon after the attack on the World Trade Center.

The Best American Essays 2003
edited by Anne Fadiman
Houghton Mifflin
$13.00 / $10.40

Since 1986, The Best American Essays has gathered the most interesting and provocative writing of the year, establishing a firm place as the leading annual of its kind. Previous editors have included Elizabeth Hardwick, Susan Sontag, Geoffrey C. Ward, Cynthia Ozick, and Stephen Jay Gould. This year's volume is terrifically diverse, with subjects ranging from driving lessons to animal rights to citizenship in times of emergency.

Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions
by Ben Mezrich

$14.00 / $11.20

Written from extensive interviews with the ring's key players, Bringing Down the House is a nail-biting read that chronicles the high stakes and close calls of six gamblers so talented--according to some, too talented--that they changed the way blackjack is played forever.

Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas
by Elaine Pagels
Random House
$24.95 / $19.96

Pagels's Gnostic Gospels brilliantly challenged accepted interpretations of early Christianity. Here, she shows that the New Testament gospel of John and the Gnostic gospel of Thomas draw on the same sources of Jesus' teaching, but interpret them in different ways. Pagels reclaims Thomas's teachings, with new interpretations of the virgin birrth, the creation of Eve, and the nature of Christians' relationship with God.

Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before
by Tony Horwitz
Picador
$15.00 / $12.00

In an exhilarating tale of historic adventure, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Confederates in the Attic retraces the voyages of Captain James Cook, the Yorkshire farm boy who drew the map of the modern world.

Doubt: A History
by Jennifer Michael Hecht
HarperCollins
$27.95 / $22.36

A fascinating account of how doubt has been the driving force in the intellectual and religious history of the world, examing everything from Socrates, Job and Ecclesiastes in the Hebrew Bible, the Buddha and Jesus, to the philosophers of medieval Islam, Galileo, Susan B. Anthony, and Marx.

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Faith: Stories
by C. Michael Curtis
Mariner
$15.00 / $12.00

Chosen by the esteemed fiction editor of the Atlantic Monthly, the stories in this volume broaden the conversation begun in God: Stories. Here are tales rooted in Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, Quaker, and Confucian as well as Jewish and Christian beliefs.

The Founding Fish
by John McPhee
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
$14.00 / $11.20

Pulitzer Prize winner John McPhee is a shad fisherman, and his passion for the annual shad run has led him to learn much of what there is to know about the fish known as Alosa sapidissima, or "most savory." .In characteristically bold and spirited prose McPhee places the fish within natural history and American history. His adventures in the pursuit of shad occasion the kind of writing, at once expert and ardent, in which he has no equal.

Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds
by Harold Bloom
Warner Books
$19.95 / $15.96

A monumental achievement of scholarship, Genius examines 100 of the most creative and literary minds in history. From the Bible to Socrates, through the transcendent achievements of Shakespeare and Dante, down through the ages to Hemingway, Faulkner, and Ralph Ellison, Bloom discusses the numerous influences of his chosen geniuses and the kinships among them over the centuries. He also offers revealing excerpts from their works that continue to surprise, enchant, and move the reader time after time.

How to Be Alone: Essays
by Jonathan Franzen
Picador USA
$14.00 / $11.20

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.

It Must Have Been Something I Ate: The Return of the Man Who Ate Everything
by Jeffrey Steingarten
Vintage
$15.00 / $12.00

Thirty-eight outrageous, deliciously provocative pieces from Vogue's indomitable food critic. Only Steingarten is sufficiently obsessed with food to go fishing for his own supply of bluefin tuna or nearly burn down his house in pursuit of the perfect pizza crust. Only Steingarten would spend four days stuffing three different fowl – into each other – to produce the Cajun specialty called “turducken.” “This is food-writing at its succulent best.”–The Sunday Times (London)

Mountains Beyond Mountains
by Tracy Kidder
Random House
$25.95 / $20.76

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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Living to Tell the Tale
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Edith Grossman

$26.95 / $21.56

From the Nobel Laureate writer Marquez comes a magnificent piece of writing that finds him telling the story of his life from his birth in 1927 through his career as a writer.

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
by Azar Nafisi
Random House
$23.95 / $19.16

For two years before she left Iran in 1997, Azar Nafisi gathered seven young women in her house every Thursday morning to read and discuss forbidden works of Western literature. Their stories intertwined with those they were reading - Pride and Prejudice, Washington Square, Daisy Miller,and Loilta - their Lolita, as they imagined her in Tehran."I was enthralled and moved by Azar Nafisi's account of how she defied, and helped others to defy, radical Islam's war against women. Her memoir contains important and properly complex reflections about the ravages of theocracy, about thoughtfulness, and about the ordeals of freedom-as well as a stirring account of the pleasures and deepening of consciousness that result from an encounter with great literature and with an inspired teacher."-Susan Sontag

The Roaring Nineties: A New History of the World's Most Prosperous Decade
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
W.W. Norton
$25.95 / $20.76

With his best-selling Globalization and Its Discontents, Joseph E. Stiglitz showed how a misplaced faith in free-market ideology led to many of the recent problems suffered by the developing nations. Here, at last, he turns the same light on the United States.

Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self
by Claire Tomalin
Vintage
$16.95 / $13.56

Tomalin's writing is as supple and lively as Pepys's own, and by fleshing out the backdrop to his Diary writings, she has created the perfect bookend to his own rollicking self-portrait . . . The best work on Pepys since Robert Louis Stevenson's classic essay, published in 1881.- New York Times

The World: Travels 1950-2000
by Jan Morris
Norton
$27.95 / $22.36

The World is a magnum opus by the finest travel writer in the world. Ranging from Manhattan to Venice, Oxford to the Middle East, and Paris to South Africa, the book provides Jan Morris's eyewitness accounts of such seminal moments as the first successful ascent of Everest, the historic Eichmann trial, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the handover of Hong Kong. Dividing the volume into five decades, Morris presents history with an unparalleled dramatic flair, creating a riveting portrait of the twentieth century, from the political idealism of the postwar years to its more recent tensions and excesses.

War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning
by Chris Hedges
Anchor
$12.95 / $10.36

Veteran New York Times reporter Chris Hedges explores war's seductive and even addictive nature. "The best kind of war journalism: It is bitterly poetic and ruthlessly philosophical. It sends out a powerful message."-Los Angeles Times

Wise Men and Their Tales: Portraits of Biblical, Talmudic, and Hasidic Masters
by Elie Wiesel
Schocken
$26.00 / $20.80

A master teacher gives us his fascinating insights into the lives of a wide range of biblical figures, Talmudic scholars, and Hasidic rabbis."It's a treat to see how Wiesel's mind works, to be privy to his literary wisdom, his insights into human character, his narrative directness and self-admitted lack of answers." -Publishers Weekly

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