Sheri Fink

Posted on April 9, 2015 by Bookworm

five daysPulitzer Prize winner Sheri Fink will talk about her best-selling book, Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital (Random House/Crown, 2013), at Boston College on Apr. 13 at 7 p.m. in Gasson Hall, room 100. The culmination of six years of reporting, Five Days at Memorial recounts the life and death choices made at a New Orleans hospital in the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The book was honored with the National Book Critics Circle Award, Ridenhour Book Prize, J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, Los Angeles TimesBook Prize, among others. Sponsor: Lowell Humanities Series. A former relief worker in disaster and conflict zones, Fink is also the author of War Hospital: A True Story of Surgery and Survival, which is about medical professionals under siege during the genocide in Srebrenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina. Fink holds a PhD and a medical degree from Stanford University. She is a correspondent for the New York Times. Reviews of Five Days: The Guardian | Entertainment Weekly | New York Times

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The Case for Reparations

Posted on April 9, 2015 by Bookworm

coatesWriter Ta-Nehisi Coates will present “The Case for Reparations” at Boston College on Apr. 13 at 7 p.m. in the Murray Room of the Yawkey Center. Coates outlined his thesis in a 2014 cover story for The Atlantic. His piece reignited the long-dormant national conversation of just how to repay African Americans for a system of institutional racism. A national correspondent for The Atlantic, Coates is the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood.  He has also written for The Village Voice, Washington City Paper, Time, The Washington Post, the Washington Monthly and O magazine. Sponsor: Office of the Provost and Dean of Faculties.

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New stories from Michael Keith

Posted on April 7, 2015 by Bookworm

nearenoughProlific author Michael Keith, an associate professor of the practice in BC’s Communication Department, has published a collection of 51 new stories titled, The Near Enough (Cold River Press, 2015).  Keith is the author of more than 20 books, including Voices in the Purple Haze, Signals in the Air, the textbook The Radio Station (now Keith’s Radio Station), the memoir The Next Better Place and eight story collections – Of Night and Light, Everything is Epic, Sad Boy, And Through the Trembling Air, Hoag’s Object, The Collector of Tears, If Things Were Made To Last Forever, Caricatures and The Near Enough.

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Book review: Golinkin’s memoir

Posted on April 6, 2015 by Bookworm

vodkaA Commonweal magazine review of A Backpack, A Bear and Eight Crates of Vodka (Doubleday, 2014) by Boston College alumnus Lev Golinkin draws comparisons to another memoir about a Jewish family fleeing the Soviet Union —Waiting for America by Boston College Professor Maxim D. Shrayer. Called a “gripping account of a family’s flight from tyranny,” Golinkin’s memoir “delves into the experience of everyday life under totalitarianism, the effects of official and cultural anti-Semitism, and the difficulties of growing up as a refugee with a past you would rather forget.” Commonweal magazine review

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On the Front Lines with Lara Logan

Posted on April 2, 2015 by Bookworm

Photo of Lara LoganThe Winston Center for Leadership and Ethics will present an evening with Emmy Award-winning journalist Lara Logan on Apr. 7 at 7 p.m. in the Heights Room of Corcoran Commons. Logan is a correspondent for “60 Minutes” and chief foreign affairs correspondent for CBS News. Logan reports regularly for the “CBS Evening News” and periodically appears on “The Early Show” and “Face The Nation” in addition to her “60 Minutes” duties. She has been honored for her work with the John F. Hogan Distinguished Service Award from the Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA), Daniel Pearl Award for Outstanding International Investigative Reporting, David Bloom Award for excellence in enterprise reporting, Association of International Broadcasters’ Best International News Story Award, Overseas Press Club Award and the RTDNA/Edward R. Murrow Award for her reporting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Logan will offer a comprehensive behind-the-scenes look at foreign affairs in the media, sharing her experiences reporting from the front lines, both as a journalist and as a citizen.

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Dinaw Mengestu

Posted on April 1, 2015 by Bookworm

all our namesAward-winning writer Dinaw Mengestu, whose works chronicle the African diaspora in America, will speak on “Politics and Aesthetics in Literature,” at Boston College on Apr. 8 at 7 p.m. in Gasson Hall, room 100. Since the debut of his bestselling novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, Mengestu’s work has earned him prestigious accolades, such as the Guardian First Book Award, the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” designation, and a 2012 MacArthur Fellowship. Born in 1978 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Mengestu immigrated to the United States at age two with his mother and sister to join his father, who had fled Ethiopia during the Red Terror. His most recent novel, All Our Names (Vintage/Random House, 2014), set in the American Midwest, alternates between narrators Isaac (an African exchange student) and Helen (an American social worker assigned to work with him), and interweaves disparate tales of naming, loving and belonging. His BC appearance is co-sponsored by Fiction Days, the Lowell Humanities Series and African and African Diaspora Studies. New York Times book review | Washington Post book review 

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Positive peer pressure

Posted on March 26, 2015 by Bookworm

jointheclubPulitzer Prize winner Tina Rosenberg will present “Harnessing Peer Pressure for Behavior Change” on Mar. 31 at 7:30 p.m. in Gasson Hall, room 100.  A veteran journalist, Rosenberg is one of the founders of the Solutions Journalism Network, which is committed to exploring solutions to major social problems. She is the author of Join the Club: How Peer Pressure can Transform the World (W. W. Norton & Company), which takes readers around the globe to show them the power of positive peer pressure.  She is also the author of Children of Cain: Violence and the Violent in Latin America and The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Sponsor: Winston Center for Leadership and Ethics

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Her Name is Rose

Posted on March 24, 2015 by Bookworm

Her Name is Rose HC Mech.inddA native New Yorker now living in Ireland, Boston College alumna Christine Breen is the author of the new book Her Name is Rose (St. Martin’s Press, 2015). Breen is the co-author of several non-fiction titles about country living in County Clare and the author of the travel memoir So Many Miles to Paradise: From Clare to There. Her Name is Rose, Breen’s first novel, is about the journey Iris, adoptive mother of 19-year-old Rose, takes to find Rose’s birth mother–a fulfillment of a promise Iris made to her late husband. According to Publishers Weekly: “Breen’s characters immediately invite the reader to go on a heartwrenching journey that’s enhanced by her skillful plotting and authentic, lyrical descriptions of the Emerald Isle. A moving first novel.”

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Boston/Cambridge and the Making of American Gothic

Posted on March 23, 2015 by Bookworm

janzJan Ziolkowski, Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Medieval Latin and director of the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection at Harvard University, will present “Boston/Cambridge and the Making of American Gothic” on Mar. 26 at  5:30 p.m. in Stokes Hall South, Auditorium S195. This lecture will discuss the great vogue for all things medieval in the Boston-Cambridge area in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Among the topics discussed will be historian and intellectual Henry Adams and his influential book, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, as well as architect Ralph Adams Cram and the Gothic Revival he created in architecture, especially the Collegiate Gothic style. The lecture will be extensively illustrated, both visually and textually. Ziolkowski has written some 60 book reviews and 100 articles. His books include Jezebel: A Norman Latin Poem of the Early Eleventh Century, Alan of Lille’s Grammar of Sex: The Meaning of Grammar to a Twelfth-Century Intellectual, Talking Animals: Medieval Latin Beast Poetry, 750-1150 and On Philology, among others. Sponsor: The Heinz Bluhm Memorial Lecture Series.

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Historian Ira Berlin

Posted on March 20, 2015 by Bookworm

iraberlinbookHistorian Ira Berlin, a distinguished university professor at the University of Maryland, will present “Rethinking the Demise of Slavery in The United States” on Mar. 25 at 7 p.m. in Gasson Hall, room 100.  Berlin is a leading historian of America and the larger Atlantic world in the 18th and 19th centuries. His books include Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (winner of Best First Book Prize from the National Historical Society);  Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in Mainland North America (winner of the Bancroft Prize, Frederick Douglass Prize, Owsley Prize, and the Rudwick Prize), and Generations of Captivity: A History of Slaves in the United States (winner of the Albert Beveridge Prize and the Ansfield Wolf Award). Berlin is also the founding editor of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project. The project’s multi-volume Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation has twice been awarded the Thomas Jefferson Prize of the Society for History in the Federal Government, as well as the J. Franklin Jameson Prize of the American Historical Association, and the Abraham Lincoln Prize for excellence in Civil-War studies. Sponsor: Lowell Humanities Series.

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