Author Archives: Bookworm
Pooling the financial risk
In her latest book, Sharing Risk: The Path to Economic Well-Being for All (University of California Press, 2025) Liberty Mutual Insurance Professor of Law Patricia McCoy probes explanations as to why financial burdens have shifted onto the backs of individual … Continue reading
What’s your sign?
After a distressing astrology reading, science-minded skeptic Leah Lockhart is on a mission to prove that her horoscope is wrong in the latest novel by Boston College graduate Jessie Rosen. In All the Signs (G.P. Putnam’s Sons/Penguin Random House, 2025), … Continue reading
Girls with Goals
Girls and women have always found a way to play soccer, in spite of bans, challenges, rules, and backward-looking attitudes. Today, soccer is the most popular women’s sport in the world. A new YA book by Boston College alumna Clelia … Continue reading
‘Parallel Letters’
Parallel Letters (Parallel’noe Pis’mo) (Sandermoen Publishing, 2025), a new bilingual collection of poems by Boston College Professor of Russian, English, and Jewish Studies Maxim D. Shrayer, showcases twin texts that were born from the same sources, but occupy different linguistic and … Continue reading
A fortune and a curse
The latest book from bestselling author Jen Calonita is about a girl who will inherit a mysterious fortune if she can break a centuries-old curse. In Isle of Ever, Everly “Benny” Benedict learns she’s the heir to a fortune, but … Continue reading
Coercive Commerce
In 1842, the Qing Empire signed a watershed commercial treaty with Great Britain, beginning a century-long period in which geopolitical and global economic entanglements intruded on Qing territory and governance. Previously understood as an era of “semi-colonialism,” Boston College Assistant … Continue reading
McAleer’s Henry von Stray is on the case
Late Boston College alumnus and Professor of English John McAleer ’45 created the literary characters Henry von Stray, a London private detective, and his collaborator, Professor John Dilpate, during the 1930s—a period known as Golden Age of detective fiction. A … Continue reading
Spenser is back
Spenser, considered Boston’s most famous fictional private investigator, takes on a new case that hits close to home in Robert B. Parker’s Hot Property (G.P. Putnam’s Sons/Penguin Random House, 2024), written by Boston College alumnus Mike Lupica. The novel opens … Continue reading
Mighty Monk Mysteries
Professor of Theology Emeritus Harvey D. Egan, S.J., a 50-year member of the Boston College Jesuit community, is the inspiration for Father Ignatius Lacroix, the reluctant detective in the new Mighty Monk Mysteries book series by D. Ansgar Nyberg, in … Continue reading
Confession
For generations, American Catholics went faithfully to confession, admitting their sins to a priest and accepting through him God’s forgiveness. The sacrament served as a distinctive marker of Catholic identity. But starting in the 1970s, many abandoned confession altogether. In … Continue reading