In the nonfiction book, The Wee Wah Beach Club in Tuxedo Park: An American Story of Social Change, 1966 Boston College graduate Stuart McGregor explores the history of an enclave for the wealthy of New York City that was established in 1886. Tuxedo Park was a recreational community historically occupied by those who built their mansions on 5th Avenue in New York City and Newport, and still exists today as a gated community. McGregor questions if U.S is heading into a new Gilded Age, where a there is significant disparity between the ultra-rich and other Americans.
Tuxedo Park
Poet C. Dale Young
Award-winning poet C. Dale Young, a 1991 Boston College graduate, has released his latest poetry collection—described as a “tour de force”—Building the Perfect Animal: New and Selected Poems (Four Ways Books, 2025). From the publisher: “As a tenured artist and veteran doctor, Young writes with a dual awareness of life’s fragility and the lyric’s endurance, presenting readers with new work that is entirely fresh even as it speaks to his broader legacy and dialogues with his preceding oeuvre. …[T]hese poems explore the author’s simultaneous embrace of mortality’s richness and resignation to death’s inevitable decay. Young surveys the perpetual ultimatum of his roles: as an oncologist, the patients (including his parents) he couldn’t save; as an artist, the self he intends to confront honestly as his body ages; and, as a mortal raised with stories of the Taino gods, the impossibility of building the perfect animal.” Young is the author of The Affliction, a novel in stories, and the poetry collections The Day Underneath the Day; The Second Person, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry; Torn, named one of the best poetry collections of 2011 by National Public Radio; The Halo, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry; and Prometeo.
Irish keywords
Two Boston College Irish Studies Program faculty members contributed articles to a special edition of New Literary History, a Journal of Theory and Interpretation. The edition is focused on ‘Irish Keywords’ and marks the 50th anniversary of Raymond Williams’ iconic Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Sullivan Chair in Irish Studies Guy Beiner wrote an essay that explores the keyword ‘seanchas,’ an Irish term meaning vernacular knowledge of history, memory, and tradition. Professor of the Practice Robert Savage penned an essay that addresses the keyword ‘Troubles.’ This term is used to describe recent unrest in Northern Ireland and is also a keyword used to define rebellions roiling the British Empire at the conclusion of World War II. Beiner is the author of the prize-winning books Remembering the Year of the French: Irish Folk History and Social Memory and Forgetful Remembrance: Social Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in Ulster. An expert on contemporary Irish and British history, Savage is the author of several publications, including the book Northern Ireland, the BBC and Censorship in Thatcher’s Britain.
Shrayer’s ‘Zion Square’
Zion Square (Ben Yehuda Press, 2025) is a new poetry collection from Boston College Professor of Russian, English, and Jewish Studies Maxim D. Shrayer. It is a book of war, love, despair, and mourning. Shrayer says he worked on the poems while violence and conflict raged in Ukraine and Israel, places of deep meaning for the writer. The collection took its final shape after Shrayer’s trip to Israel, where he lectured, gave readings, and saw family and friends. He calls Zion Square “a meditation on writing about wars while living between languages and cultures.” Shrayer, a bilingual writer and translator, has published more than 25 books, including Waiting for America: A Story of Emigration; Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story; Immigrant Baggage; and Kinship.
A global take on parenting
Scolding other people’s children is largely taboo in America, but in other countries, such as the Netherlands, it can be a key part of a community-oriented approach to raising kids. That’s just one of the surprising insights found in Please Yell at My Kids (Balance/Hachette Book Group, 2025) by Boston College graduate Marina Lopes, which examines different styles of parenting around the world. Lopes argues that American parents, and their children, could benefit from incorporating ideas and customs found in other cultures. For her book, Lopes visited 10 countries to interview parents about their cultures’ child-rearing norms. Lopes was born in Brazil and served as foreign correspondent for the Washington Post. More from Boston College Magazine.
The power of hateful imagery
Julius Streicher, who was convicted of crimes against humanity during the Nuremberg trials, was the publisher of Der Stürmer, a tabloid newspaper renowned for its anti-Semitism and use as a propaganda tool for the Nazi party. Streicher and his anti-Semitic publications, which included three children’s books, are the subject of a new book by longtime Boston College Professor John Michalczyk. In Julius Streicher – Tainted Images, Stolen Lives: The Anti-Semitic Tabloid ‘Der Stürmer’ and Children’s Readers (De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2025), Michalczyk focuses on Streicher’s sordid, and at times semi-pornographic, visual imagery, placing these works in historical, aesthetic, religious, and political context. According to Michalczyk, this study of Streicher and his influential visual propaganda is timely, given the rise in anti-Semitism, spread of disinformation on social media, and dissemination of messages of hate online. Michalczyk, the director of Film Studies at BC, is known for his numerous books and documentary films about World War II and the Holocaust, as well as others on the themes of conflict resolution, moral compromises, and social justice.
Higher education’s value
College students and their parents often question the “return on investment” from humanities courses, but Boston College Professor of English Carlo Rotella says that misses the point of what’s going on in the classroom. He contends that teaching—particularly an English-lit course—is not about a clean transfer of knowledge. His new book, What Can I Get Out of This? Teaching and Learning in a Classroom Full of Skeptics (University of California Press, 2025), offers an eloquent and moving story about the value and the pleasures of intellectual exploration, and why it matters beyond the classroom. What Can I Get Out of This? provides an intimate look at teaching and learning from the perspective of Rotella and the 33 BC students in his course. He demonstrates how the students’ reluctance—”How does this get me a job?”—transforms into insight as they wrestle with challenging books, share ideas, discover how to think critically, and form a community. They learn how to extract meaning from the world around them, revealing the truth of what students actually experience in college. Learn more: WBZ Radio | WWOD New Hampshire | WGTD Wisconsin | Q&A with Deborah Kalb. A regular contributor to the New York Times Magazine, Rotella has written books about cities, boxing, music, and literature, including The World Is Always Coming to an End, Cut Time, and Playing in Time.
Posted in Boston College Authors
Tagged English Department, higher education, liberal arts
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Historian Jill Lepore
The Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy will host historian and author Jill Lepore on December 3. She will deliver a lecture in the Burns Library at 5 p.m. based on her new book, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution. In We the People, Lepore discusses successful and unsuccessful amendments to the constitution and argues that the Framers did not intend for the Constitution to remain stagnant, “like a butterfly under glass,” but rather that it should be continuously amended and modified. Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a professor of law at Harvard Law School. She is a staff writer for the New Yorker and the author of the international bestseller These Truths: A History of the United States, among other books
The Camino Ignaciano
An updated edition of the Official Guide to the Camino Ignaciano has been released by Jesuit Sources, part of the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies at Boston College. Written by José Luis Iriberri, S.J., and Chris Lowney, the Official Guide to the Camino Ignaciano offers pilgrims of today both practical information and spiritual guidance on how to retrace the journey Saint Ignatius made in 1522 from Loyola to Montserrat, Manresa, and beyond. The guide includes comprehensive advice on when to go, where to stay, what routes to follow, and what landmarks to visit along the way, as well as reflections that will help pilgrims to pray through the Spiritual Exercises. Official Guide to the Camino Ignaciano will help readers in discovering personal transformation just as Ignatius did—through perseverance, faith, and deep reflection.
A collection of essays by Chris Bruell
Boston College alumni Eric Buzzetti and Devin Stauffer, who both earned doctorates in political science from BC in 1998, have edited a landmark collection of writings by Christopher Bruell, a highly regarded Boston College professor of political science who died in 2024. A student of the renowned political philosopher Leo Strauss, Bruell was considered one of the great modern interpreters of classical and modern political philosophy. Christopher Bruell: Essays of Five Decades on Philosophy and Philosophers (SUNY Press, 2025) includes almost all the essays, lectures, and book chapters that Bruell published during his scholarly career. The volume also includes three previously unpublished essays. The essays take up a wide range of topics, including Strauss, liberal education, the problem of relativism, the American Founding, the nature of citizenship, and the question of happiness. Above all, the collection focuses on the recovery of classical political philosophy and includes pathbreaking essays on Thucydides, Plato, Xenophon, and Aristotle. Buzzetti is on the faculty of Concordia University in Montréal. Stauffer is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
BC Bookmarks 