Harvard Book Store Channel |
-
December 17, 2020
Katie Mack and Kim Stanley Robinson
present The End of Everything and The Ministry for the Future -
November 12, 2020
Jerald Walker and Robert Atwan
present How to Make a Slave and Other Essays and The Best American Essays 2020 -
November 5, 2020
What Just Happened: Writers Discuss the Post-Election Moment
-
October 23, 2020
Deborah Willis, John Stauffer, and Sarah Lewis
discuss To Make Their Own Way in the World with Ilisa Barbash -
October 19, 2020
Claire Messud and André Aciman
present Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write and Find Me -
September 28, 2020
Felton Earls and Mary Carlson
discuss Voice, Choice, and Action with Alex Kotlowitz -
August 22, 2020
Bookstore Romance Day Panel
-
July 31, 2020
Alexander Keyssar
discusses Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? with Miles Rapoport -
July 30, 2020
Sara Faith Alterman
discusses Let's Never Talk About This Again with Meredith Goldstein -
July 24, 2020
Adrian Tomine
discusses The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist with Leanne Shapton -
July 12, 2020
Where Do We Go From Here: A Fundraiser for Black Lives
-
June 8, 2020
Megha Majumdar and Sue Monk Kidd
discuss A Burning and The Book of Longings with Jordan Pavlin -
May 27, 2020
Heather Cox Richardson
discusses How the South Won the Civil War with Lindsay M. Chervinsky -
November 27, 2018
David A. Kaplan
presents The Most Dangerous Branch: Inside the Supreme Court's Assault on the Constitution -
October 19, 2018
Jabari Asim
discusses We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival with Adrian Walker -
October 1, 2018
Sarah Smarsh
presents Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth -
September 13, 2018
Soraya Chemaly
discusses Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger with Jaclyn Friedman -
August 15, 2018
Roy Scranton
discusses We're Doomed. Now What? Essays on War and Climate Change with Andrew Bacevich -
June 11, 2018
Howard Bryant
presents The Heritage: Black Athletes, a Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism -
February 26, 2018
Fifty Years Since MLK
with Brandon M. Terry, Tommie Shelby, Elizabeth Hinton, and Cornel West -
November 14, 2017
Slavoj Žižek and Alenka Zupančič
discuss Incontinence of the Void and What IS Sex? with Mladen Dolar -
October 27, 2017
Worldwide Week with Transition Magazine
featuring Phanuel Antwi, David Chariandy, Sarah Ladipo Manyika, Moses Kilolo, Danielle Legros Georges, Enzo Silon Surin, and Novuyo Rosa Tshuma -
September 7, 2017
Vanessa Grigoriadis
discusses Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus -
March 22, 2017
Chris Hayes
discusses a Colony in a Nation with Jabari Asim, Frank Rudy Cooper, and Anthony Brooks -
February 22, 2017
Yuval Noah Harari
discusses Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow with Michael Sandel -
February 17, 2017
James R. Valcourt
discusses Systematic: How Systems Biology Is Transforming Modern Medicine -
February 6, 2017
Gender and Color in Comics
A panel discussion featuring Mildred Louis, John Jennings, and Joel Christian Gill -
January 29, 2017
Melissa Fleming
discusses A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea: One Refugee's Incredible Story of Love, Loss, & Survival -
January 9, 2017
Keramet Reiter
discusses 23/7: Pelican Bay Prison and the Rise of Long-Term Solitary Confinement -
October 26, 2016
Sara Goldrick-Rab
discusses Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream -
October 24, 2016
Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot
discusses Growing Each Other Up: When Our Children Become Our Teachers -
August 29, 2016
An Evening with Pangyrus
Boston's new journal of literature, perspective, arts, and politics -
May 20, 2016
Malcolm K. Sparrow
discusses Handcuffed: What Holds Policing Back, and the Keys to Reform -
April 8, 2016
Thomas Frank
discusses Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? -
February 19, 2016
Hillary L. Chute
discusses Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form -
January 29, 2016
Roberto G. Gonzales
discusses Lives in Limbo: Undocumented and Coming of Age in America -
December 9, 2015
An Evening of Poetry with Boston Review
featuring Mary Jo Bang, Lucie Brock-Broido, Stephen Burt, and Major Jackson -
October 8, 2015
Roberta Kaplan
discusses Then Comes Marriage: United States v. Windsor and the Defeat of DOMA with Eric Lander -
September 18, 2015
Daniel Geary and Benjamin Hedin
discuss today's civil rights movement with Eugene Rivers -
June 19, 2015
City by City
featuring Stephen Squibb and contributors Greg Afinogenov, Dan Albert, and Annie Wyman -
June 16, 2015
The Nation’s First 150 Years
featuring Katrina vanden Heuvel, D.D. Guttenplan, and Chloe Maxmin -
March 24, 2015
Barney Frank
discusses Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage -
September 3, 2014
George Marshall
discusses Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change -
May 2, 2014
The Opposite of Loneliness
Essays and stories by Marina Keegan presented by Anne Fadiman, Ratna Gill, and Luke Vargas -
September 28, 2012
Steven Johnson
discusses Future Perfect: The Case For Progress In A Networked Age -
September 28, 2012
Natalie Hopkinson
discusses Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate City -
September 21, 2012
Daniel Kantstroom
discusses Aftermath: Deportation Law and the New American Diaspora -
October 18, 2011
Ron Suskind
discusses Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President -
March 4, 2011
Maya Jasanoff
discusses Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World
-
December 20, 2013
Don’t Watch This If You Are a Bookseller’s Cousin or Mom
What is our discerning staff giving for the holidays? -
September 22, 2011
Minimum Paige: A Harvard Book Store Comic Anthology
A project this heroic could only be accomplished by the most dynamic of duos. -
September 16, 2011
Lucy the Wonder-Pup Picks the Booker
Can this adorable puppy predict the winner of the Man Booker Prize? -
January 21, 2011
HBTV Presents: Jurassic Books
A short film that ponders the possibilities of a large scale book printing robot... -
January 14, 2011
HBTV Is On The Air!
Cambridge's only local, fictional television station that's based out of an independent book store. -
September 8, 2010
Carole
recommends Wrestling with Moses and The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Gift Cards |
-
Add a gift card to your order!

-
Renegade Dreams: Living through Injury in Gangland Chicago
by Laurence RalphPrice $20.00Paperback
In Stock
Laurence Ralph
Harvard Book Store welcomes LAURENCE RALPH, assistant professor in the Departments of Anthropology and African and African American Studies at Harvard University, for a discussion of his book Renegade Dreams: Living through Injury in Gangland Chicago.
Every morning Chicagoans wake up to the same stark headlines that read like some macabre score: “13 shot, 4 dead overnight across the city,” and nearly every morning the same elision occurs: what of the nine other victims? As with war, much of our focus on inner-city violence is on the death toll, but the reality is that far more victims live to see another day and must cope with their injuries—both physical and psychological—for the rest of their lives. Renegade Dreams is their story. Walking the streets of one of Chicago’s most violent neighborhoods—where the local gang has been active for more than fifty years—Laurence Ralph talks with people whose lives are irrecoverably damaged, seeking to understand how they cope and how they can be better helped.
Going deep into a West Side neighborhood most Chicagoans only know from news reports—a place where children have been shot just for crossing the wrong street—Ralph unearths the fragile humanity that fights to stay alive there, to thrive, against all odds. He talks to mothers, grandmothers, and pastors, to activists and gang leaders, to the maimed and the hopeful, to aspiring rappers, athletes, or those who simply want safe passage to school or a steady job. Gangland Chicago, he shows, is as complicated as ever. It’s not just a warzone but a community, a place where people’s dreams are projected against the backdrop of unemployment, dilapidated housing, incarceration, addiction, and disease, the many hallmarks of urban poverty that harden like so many scars in their lives. Recounting their stories, he wrestles with what it means to be an outsider in a place like this, whether or not his attempt to understand, to help, might not in fact inflict its own damage. Ultimately he shows that the many injuries these people carry—like dreams—are a crucial form of resilience, and that we should all think about the ghetto differently, not as an abandoned island of unmitigated violence and its helpless victims but as a neighborhood, full of homes, as a part of the larger society in which we all live, together, among one another.
Laurence Ralph is Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies and Anthropology at Harvard University. His recently published ethnography, Renegade Dreams: Living Through Injury in Gangland Chicago, explores the networks of commerce, criminality, and affiliation that congeal in the figure of the disabled gang affiliate. Disabled gang members, he argues, are one of several kinds of urban residents who are especially susceptible to “injury,” a concept he uses to theorize several related genres of debility. Laurence’s research interests include: Gang Formations; Urban Anthropology; Disability; Medical Anthropology; Masculinity; Race; Theories of Violence; Popular Culture and Hip Hop. Laurence’s work has been published in The Anthropology Exchange (2006), Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power (2010),Transition, and Anthropological Theory.