A boyhood remembered
In his memoir, Kaufman’s Hill (Bancroft Press, 2015), author John C. Hampsey recalls his boyhood in Pittsburgh during the 1960s, before the counterculture revolution takes hold. Hampsey’s world is a mix of exhilarating freedom — because of absent parents, teachers, and priests — and imminent dangers. His middle-class Catholic neighborhood is dominated by bullies who often terrify him. He befriends the enigmatic, erratic, but charismatic Taddy Keegan. Hampsey focuses on uncovering the mystery of Taddy. Hampsey, who graduated from Boston College with a doctorate in English, is a professor at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. His stories and essays have been published in The Gettysburg Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Antioch Review, The Alaska Quarterly, The Boston Globe, Arizona Quarterly, European Romantic Review, Witness, Colby Quarterly, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and McNeese Review.
Posted in Alumni Authors
Tagged 1960s, Catholic, English Department, memoir, Pittsburgh
Leave a comment
Innovations in Mass Spectrometry
Mass spectrometry has long served as an invaluable tool for detection of type and concentration of chemicals present in carefully prepared laboratory samples. Ambient ionization has emerged as one of the hottest and fastest growing topics in mass spectrometry, enabling sample analysis with minimal sample preparation. Marek Domin, director of the Mass Spectrometry Center in Boston College’s Chemistry Department, has co-edited a book on this topic. Ambient Ionization Mass Spectrometry (Royal Society of Chemistry, 2014) is the first book to offer a comprehensive, unique treatise devoted to the subject. Written by leaders and practitioners in the field, it serves as an excellent gateway to understanding the benefits and uses of this new technology — which has applications in fields ranging from biomedical, food safety and pollution to criminal analysis and national security and beyond. Domin was interviewed by BC Libraries about the book.
In honor of Richard Cobb-Stevens
Philosophy Professor Emeritus Richard Cobb-Stevens’ work in phenomenological philosophy, analytic philosophy and the history of philosophy has served as model for generations of philosophers working between these three fields of research. As a tribute to Cobb-Stevens, several leading experts in phenomenological philosophy from North America and Europe have contributed essays to a new volume, Phenomenology in a New Key: Between Analysis and History: Essays in Honor of Richard Cobb-Stevens (Springer, 2015). Edited by Associate Professor of Philosophy Jeffrey Bloechl and Nicolas de Warren, Phenomenology in a New Key brings phenomenological thinking to bear on a wide variety of problems, from the nature of artworks and photography to questions concerning consciousness and knowledge. Historical figures such as Aristotle and Hobbes are innovatively brought into dialogue with phenomenological thinking. Among the book’s contributors are Associate Professor of Philosophy Andrea Staiti and Emeritus faculty member Jacques Taminiaux.
Postcards from Paris
In Bettyville (Viking, 2015), magazine and book editor George Hodgman, travels from New York City to Paris, but readers should not expect a glamorous travelogue. The destination is Paris, Missouri, and Hodgman returns to his childhood home and cares for his mother who is living with dementia. Hodgman’s memoir, a New York Times bestseller, is a bittersweet story about a mother and a son. Sharing a home once again, they grapple with regrets and resentments while finding humor, grace and respect in the everyday life of this new chapter of their relationship. Hodgman, who earned a master’s degree from Boston College, has been an editor at Simon and Schuster, Vanity Fair and Houghton Mifflin. Listen to an interview with Hodgman on NPR’s “Fresh Air.” | More from the New York Times. Last week, Paramount Television announced that it is in development to adapt the book into a half-hour dramedy series.
Yeats and Afterwords
Associate Professor of English Marjorie Howes is a contributor to and co-editor (with Joseph Valente) of Yeats and Afterwords (University of Notre Dame Press, 2014). The book’s contributors articulate Nobel Prize winner W. B. Yeats’s powerful, multi-layered sense of belatedness as part of his complex literary method. They explore how Yeats deliberately positioned himself at various historical endpoints—of Romanticism, of the Irish colonial experience, of the Ascendancy, of civilization itself—and, in doing so, created a distinctively modernist poetics of iteration capable of registering the experience of finality and loss. While the crafting of such a poetics remained a constant throughout Yeats’s career, the particular shape it took varied over time, depending on which lost object Yeats was contemplating. Howes is the author of Yeats’s Nations: Gender, Class and Irishness.
Kindness of strangers
A new book by Casey Beaumier, SJ, director of the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies at Boston College, recalls his days as a Jesuit novice and a pilgrimage he took to help in his discernment. A Purposeful Path: How Far Can You Go with $30, a Bus Ticket, and a Dream? (Loyola Press, 2015) is part memoir and part inspirational guide. Readers will join the young Jesuit as he travels the Appalachian Trail, reliant only on the kindness of strangers and his faith. Through it all, Fr. Beaumier discovers that the best way through life’s hard battles is to trust God and keep on moving. Fr. Beaumier earned a doctorate in United States religious history from Boston College. He teaches in the Capstone Program and serves as mentor and spiritual director for students, seminarians, women religious and priests. Read an excerpt. Video
Blueprints
Boston College alumna and best-selling author Barbara Delinsky has published her latest novel, Blueprints (St. Martin’s Press, 2015). Blueprints is the story of Caroline and Jamie MacAfee. The day after her 56th birthday, Caroline is told that she is too old to be the public face of Gut It!, a family-based home construction show, and that her 29-year-old daughter, Jamie, will replace her as its host. The resulting rift occurs at a time when each needs the other more than ever. More about the book. Delinsky is the author of dozens of novels and the non-fiction book, UPLIFT: Secrets from the Sisterhood of Breast Cancer Survivors. She was recently interviewed by USA Today | Kirkus Review
Origins of international adoption
In her new book, To Save the Children of Korea: The Cold War Origins of International Adoption (Stanford University Press, June 2015), Assistant Professor of History Arissa Oh contends that although Korea was not the first place that Americans adopted from internationally, it was the place where organized, systematic international adoption was born. Korean adoption began in the aftermath of the Korean War and served as a kind of template for when international adoption began–in the late 1960s–to expand to new sending and receiving countries. First established as an emergency measure through which to evacuate mixed-race “GI babies,” Korean adoption became a mechanism through which the Korean government exported its unwanted children: the poor, the disabled, or those lacking Korean fathers. Focusing on the legal, social, and political systems at work, this book shows how the growth of Korean adoption from the 1950s to the 1980s occurred within the context of the neocolonial U.S.-Korea relationship, and was facilitated by crucial congruencies in American and Korean racial thought, government policies and nationalisms. Oh was interviewed recently by the Boston Globe about topic of her book.
Posted in Boston College Authors
Tagged adoption, Cold War, History Department, Korea
Leave a comment
BC Bookmarks 