Tag: ” Books

  • Nation & World

    Sobering look at ‘mind-body connection’

    Mind-body medicine goes by many names today — including holistic, complementary, or alternative medicine. Regardless of what it’s called, many people embrace the ideas behind the mind-body connection and its effect on health, sometimes despite a lack of supporting scientific evidence. In her recently published book, “The Cure Within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine” (W.W.…

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Ancient text has long and dangerous reach

    Ask a well-read individual to list the most dangerous books in history, and a few familiar titles would most likely make the cut: Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” Marx and Engels’ “The Communist Manifesto,” Chairman Mao’s “Little Red Book.”

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    E.J. Corey, Harvard affiliates honored with AAP book award

    The Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers (AAP) recently selected “Molecules and Medicine” — co-authored by Sheldon Emery Professor of Organic Chemistry Emeritus E.J. Corey and postdoctoral fellows in chemistry and chemical biology Barbara Czako and Laszlo Kurti — as the recipient of its 2007 award for best book published…

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    War and changing concepts of masculinity

    The Vietnam War cost the United States just over 58,000 dead — less than 5 percent of the 1.4 million Vietnamese, French, and other military personnel killed in Indochina combat going back to 1950.

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Armstrong: God is hard to get to know

    Man’s practical understanding of God, said one religious scholar speaking at Harvard, is “like a goldfish trying to understand a computer. … It will always be beyond us.”

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Sanders Theatre features talk on building schools for peaceful world

    In the remote and mountainous Baltistan region of Pakistan, the beverage of choice is paiyu cha, a mixture of green tea, salt, baking soda, goat’s milk, and a rancid yak butter called mar.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Scholar looks at abiding interest in the ‘Great American Novel’

    Literary critics tend to discredit the concept of a “Great American Novel” as nothing more than media hype — an arbitrary appellation that has more to do with pipe dreams than merit. And yet, what would-be author hasn’t imagined, when putting pen to paper, what it would feel like to be hailed as the greatest…

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Tools for ‘navigating childhood’

    The fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen have enchanted children the world over for more than two centuries with their verbal sorcery and expressive intensity. Now their iconic power has drawn the attention of a Harvard professor, who hopes to broaden our understanding of how those eye-widening fairy tales expand the imaginations of children.

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Newsmakers

    Swanee Hunt, founding director of the Women and Public Policy Program at the Kennedy School of Government (KSG), accepted the Leadership in Advocacy Award from the Asian Task Force Against Domestic Violence (ATASK) at the group’s 14th annual Silk Road Gala Nov. 3 at the Boston Marriott Copley Plaza Hotel. “The Conquest of Nature” by…

    2 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Tale of John Harvard’s surviving book

    This November, Harvard University will mark the 400th anniversary of the birth of John Harvard, not the institution’s founder as he is sometimes credited, but rather its first major benefactor. Such a noteworthy anniversary warrants reflection, although, unfortunately, a great many details about both the history of John Harvard and the legacy of his library…

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Darnton looks at the ‘art and politics of libel’ in 18th century France

    Government censors in pre-Revolutionary France were so hypervigilant that under their watchful eyes no one with anything significant to say dared publish their works in their own country. The solution was to publish abroad and smuggle the contraband books into France where they were soon snapped up by eager readers.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    John Harvard Book Project to provide books to local schools

    Few names are as universally known as Harvard, yet little is known about John Harvard. What is known is that the donation of his personal library to a fledgling Colonial college helped lay the foundation for the largest academic library in the world. In honor of the 400th anniversary of the University’s original benefactor’s birth…

    2 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Kozol campaigns for educational reform

    At times as he spoke in the Memorial Church last Thursday (Sept. 20) Jonathan Kozol, educator, activist, and author, sounded more fervent than an impassioned man of God preaching eternal salvation.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Ulrich explains that well-behaved women should make history

    Most bumper sticker slogans do not originate in academic publications. However, in the 1970s, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich penned in a scholarly article about the funeral sermons of Christian women that “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” The phrase subsequently gained wide popularity, appearing on T-shirts, coffee mugs, and other items — and it’s now the title…

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    New exhibit at Houghton Library features decorated papers

    In the 1930s when Boston bookbinder and society matron Rosamond B. Loring (1889–1950) was unable to find ornamental papers she considered good enough to serve as end leaves for her books, she took matters into her own hands, teaching herself to make what are known in bookbinding as “decorated papers.” Her initiative, especially with paste…

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Government holds seeds to its own reform

    The seeds of a new, more efficient government able to nimbly handle the challenges of a new century are sprouting in the corridors of today’s slow-moving bureaucracy, according to Elaine Kamarck, a lecturer in public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government.

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Harvard Foundation to welcome Esmeralda Santiago

    The Harvard Foundation will host a lecture by Esmeralda Santiago ’76, author of the memoirs “When I Was Puerto Rican” and “Almost a Woman,” and the novel “América’s Dream.” The lecture will take place April 10 from 4 to 5 p.m. in Harvard Hall (Room 104).

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    Libraries, museums meet with IT

    The ability to search the actual text of millions of books — instead of just titles or summaries — will change the way students and academics conduct research, revealing a host of new sources invisible to current search methods, a Harvard University Library official working on the Google project said on March 28.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Serhii Plokhii is new Hrushevs’kyi Professor of Ukrainian History

    Serhii Plokhii, a prolific scholar whose studies have opened up a new pathway of studying Ukraine’s relationship with Eastern and Central Europe, has been appointed Hrushevs’kyi Professor of Ukrainian History in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), effective July 1.

    2 minutes
  • Nation & World

    ‘Redefining Health Care’ collects Hamilton Award

    “Redefining Health Care: Creating Value-Based Competition on Results,” by Michael E. Porter, the Bishop William Lawrence University Professor, and Elizabeth Olmsted Teisberg, a senior institute associate at Harvard Business School’s Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness and an associate professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, has been awarded the 2007 James A.…

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    Engell wins Ness Book Award

    The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) has awarded its Frederic W. Ness Book Award to James Engell, the Gurney Professor of English Literature and professor of comparative literature, for his book with Anthony Dangerfield, “Saving Higher Education in the Age of Money.”

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    HBS-affiliated work named top management book

    “From Resource Allocation to Strategy” (Oxford University Press), co-edited by Joseph L. Bower, the Donald Kirk David Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, has been named the best management book of 2006 by Strategy + Business magazine.

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    Tian loves poetry – from Plath to Yuanming

    Xiaofei Tian, a youthful looking Harvard scholar of Chinese poetry, could easily be mistaken for an undergraduate in the halls of 2 Divinity Ave., where she works in a book-lined office. Last September, at age 34, Tian got word of her tenure in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. To celebrate, she and…

    7 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Porter, Teisberg win Hamilton Award for ‘Redefining Health Care’

    “Redefining Health Care: Creating Value-Based Competition on Results” (Harvard Business School Press) by Michael E. Porter, the Bishop William Lawrence University Professor, based at Harvard Business School, and Elizabeth Olmsted Teisberg, a senior institute associate at Harvard Business School’s Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness and an associate professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School,…

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    HBS’s Sunil Gupta recognized with Berry-AMA Book Prize

    “Managing Customers as Investments: The Strategic Value of Customers in the Long Run” (Wharton School Publishing), co-authored by Sunil Gupta, Harvard Business School’s Edward W. Carter Professor of Business Administration, has received the 2006 Berry-AMA Book Prize from the American Marketing Association (AMA) as the best book in marketing reviewed that year.

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    Chinese diarist opens door to history

    Liu Dapeng (1857-1942), the subject of Henrietta Harrison’s book “The Man Awakened from Dreams” (Stanford University Press, 2005), seems an odd choice for a biography. A Confucian scholar and teacher in the village of Chiqiao in Shanxi province, northern China, Liu was poor and unknown, and, although a prolific writer, never published a word.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Jerome Hamilton Buckley

    Jerome Hamilton Buckley, Gurney Professor of English Literature, Emeritus, was born in Toronto on August 30, 1917, and received his secondary education at Humberside Collegiate Institute where the principal called him “one of the most brilliant pupils” ever to attend the school.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Prohibition politics created groundwork for modern liberalism

    While Prohibition in America failed to rid the nation of demon rum, it did unleash a wave of change in the American cultural and political sphere whose ripples are still seen today. According to new research by Lisa McGirr, a historian in Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), the fallout from the impossible…

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Richardson explores what motivates ‘targeting of noncombatants’

    What do terrorists want? The question has reverberated in the consciousness of the West ever since the dreadful and unexpected events of 9/11. Were these appalling acts of violence perpetrated because “They hate our freedoms,” as President Bush asserted? Are terrorists simply insane, barbaric, nihilistic, as others have theorized?

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Orlov Rubinow, former Harvard University Press editor, dies at 81

    Betty Ann Orlov Rubinow, 81, formerly of Cambridge, Mass., and Stowe, Vt., died unexpectedly from complications of pneumonia on Jan. 5 at St. Joseph’s Hospital, Tucson, Ariz., where she had lived with her husband, Merrill Rubinow.

    3 minutes