The book 5 Steps to Effective Student Leadership: Insights & Examples (New City Press, 2014) combines student affairs best practices with Ignatian spirituality in a resource for the formation of student leaders. Inspired by the lives and experiences of actual student leaders, 5 Steps offers real-world examples of how to engage students in effective practices that both teach the individual and build the community. The authors are BC alumni Dennis Carr and Hannah Trost and Lynch School of Education lecturer Michael James, director of LSOE’s Institute for Administrators in Catholic Higher Education.
Forming student leaders
The Hopefuls
Best-selling author and Boston College alumna Jennifer Close tells a story about ambition and marriage in her new novel, The Hopefuls (Knopf, 2016). Husband and wife Matt and Beth, newcomers to Washington, D.C., befriend a charismatic White House staffer named Jimmy, and his wife, Ashleigh. Soon the couples’ friendship—and Beth’s relationship with Matt—is threatened by jealousy, competition, and rumors. Close also is the author of Girls in White Dresses and The Smart One. Read an interview with Close in Entertainment Weekly. | Washington Post book review
Tavarelli’s Star Fragments
BC Fine Arts Professor of the Practice Andrew Tavarelli has traveled extensively in Bali and Southeast Asia—always with a journal, a set of watercolors, and a camera. Material from Tavarelli’s travel journal provided the basis for his unpublished novel, False Stars. Now, Tavarelli has taken passages from that book and combined them with watercolors to create a new novel, Star Fragments. The author/artist, who believes in the adage “a picture is worth a thousand words,” writes in the book’s preface that “Just as each [narrator’s] voice adds to the richness of the story, the imagery expands the narrative and makes it tangible.” View or download here.
Catholic Press book awards
Boston College professors Richard Gaillardetz, Kristin Heyer, and Stephen Pope recently won book awards from the Catholic Press Association. More from BC News.
Posted in Awards/Honors, Boston College Authors
Tagged Catholic, Theology Department
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Hogs Wild
There’s a wealth of information about everything from meteorites to shrapnel in Ian Frazier’s new book, but you read his work primarily for the encounter between his sensibility and the world, according to a New York Times review of Frazier’s new collection Hogs Wild by Professor of English and fellow essayist Carlo Rotella. Rotella is the author of several books, including Playing in Time: Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories, Cut Time: An Education at the Fights and Good With Their Hands: Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters from the Rust Belt.
Tyvian returns
Science fiction/fantasy author Auston Habershaw, a Boston College alumnus, has published No Good Deed (HarperCollins, 2016), the second book in his “The Saga of the Redeemed” series. No Good Deed continues the story of “criminal mastermind, rogue mage, and smuggler of sorcerous goods” Tyvian Reldamar, who was introduced to readers in The Oldest Trick. From the publisher: Tyvian “hears that his old nemesis, Myreon Alafarr, has been framed for a crime she didn’t commit and turned to stone in a penitentiary garden. Somebody is trying to get his attention, and that somebody is playing a very high-stakes game that will draw Tyvian and his friends back to the city of his birth and right under the noses of the Defenders he’s been dodging for so long. The worst part is that the person pulling all the strings is none other than the most powerful sorceress in the West: Lyrelle Reldamar. Tyvian’s own mother.” Learn more about Habershaw’s journey as a writer and his upcoming book readings at his blog.
Jumbled Joy
Professional organizer Susan Bohenko, a Boston College alumna, has published her first book, Jumbled Joy. The children’s book is based on Bohenko’s daughter, Joy, and her messy room. The mess does not bother Joy until her favorite treasures becomes lost in the clutter and chaos of her bedroom. The book teaches kids to take care of their things and to stay organized. Bohenko was recently interviewed by her hometown paper.
Nouveau literacy
Associate Professor of History Dana Sajdi was recently interviewed about her book The Barber of Damascus: Nouveau Literacy in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Levant (Stanford University Press). Her book looks at the life and work of Shihab al-Din Ahmad Ibn Budayr, a barber in Damascus in the 18th century. The barber wrote a book recording events that took place in the city during his lifetime—part of a new phenomenon, nouveau literacy, or history writing by people outside the learned establishment. Listen to the New Books Network podcast of the interview.
The Americans by Car
Fine Arts Assistant Professor of the Practice Karl Baden has published The Americans by Car, a retrospective of his archival work that pays tribute to two influential photographers, Robert Frank and Lee Friedlander. The photographs in the book were taken by Baden from his car and offer a snapshot of American life. A homage to Robert Frank’s The Americans and Lee Friedlander’s America by Car, Baden’s book “is a personal, more specific answer to the vague question of ‘how are we influenced,'” according to the artist. The cover of The Americans by Car is a photograph of a Boston tourist trolley Baden shot from his car in 2012. Baden discussed his book, the role humor plays in his work, and the impact Frank, Friedlander and other artists had on him in an interview with the photography blogger Elin Spring.
The Jury in America
Enshrined in the Constitution and Bill of Rights, a jury trial is an essential right for all Americans. It places citizens at the very heart of the U.S. legal order. And yet at the dawn of the 21st century, juries resolve only a small percentage of legal cases, and concern has arisen that the jury is “vanishing” from both the criminal and civil courts. In The Jury in America: Triumph and Decline (University Press of Kansas, 2016), BC political scientist Dennis Hale contends that a preference for expert judgment has replaced public judgment, giving rise to arbitration, settlements and trials decided by judges only. In his new book, Hale combines legal history and political analysis to traces what the American jury system was, what it has become, and what the ramifications could be of a withering jury system. BC Libraries presents an interview with Hale.
Posted in Boston College Authors
Tagged judicial system, justice, law, Political Science department
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