Boston Strong
Boston Magazine has published an exclusive excerpt from the new book Boston Strong: A City’s Triumph over Tragedy (ForeEdge/University Press of New England, 2015), co-written by Boston College alumnus Dave Wedge. In the book, Wedge and co-author Casey Sherman use their journalism skills to tell the inside story of the Boston Marathon bombing. The book is based on extensive interviews with first responders, detectives assigned to the Tsarnaev brothers manhunt, recovering victims and those who lost loved ones. A film based on the book is in development. Another Boston College alumnus, Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, wrote the book’s foreword.
Fink appearance postponed
Due to the weather, the talk by Pulitzer Prize winner Sheri Fink scheduled for Jan. 28 has been postponed. Stay tuned to BC Humanities Series website for updates.
Posted in Uncategorized
Leave a comment
Two Faces of Political Islam
Boston College Professor of Political Science Ali Banuazizi will present “Politicization of Religion or Sacralization of Politics: Two Faces of Political Islam” on January 28 at 12:00 noon at the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at 24 Quincy Road. Banuazizi’s research focuses on the political cultures of the Middle East; comparative study of religion, civil society, and politics in the Middle East; and Iran’s social history and contemporary domestic politics and foreign relations. He is the editor of several volumes, including The New Geopolitics of Central Asia and Its Borderlands. He is the founding editor of the journal Iranian Studies. An RSVP for the public lecture is required. Email susan.richard@bc.edu.
Pulitzer Prize winner Sheri Fink
Pulitzer 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 Jan. 28 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 Times Book 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
Posted in Guest Authors, Lowell Humanities Series
Tagged ethics, natural disaster, New Orleans, nonfiction, Pulitzer Prize winner
Leave a comment
Book review by Stephen Pope
Boston College Theologian Stephen Pope has written a review of Evolution, Games, and God: The Principle of Cooperation, edited by Martin A. Nowak and Sarah Coakley, for Commonweal magazine. In his review, Pope writes “Coakley and Nowak’s book provides an excellent resource for anyone who wants to learn about current thinking at the nexus of evolutionary theory, ethics, and theology…This is one of the best books on this topic in the past decade.” Pope is the author of Human Evolution and Christian Ethics (Cambridge University Press).
Women of Will
J. Donald Monan, S.J., Professor in Theatre Arts Tina Packer, a renowned expert on Shakespeare, is the author of the forthcoming book, Women of Will (Knopf Doubleday, 2015) — the product of her lifelong exploration of Shakespeare’s famed yet misunderstood heroines. It is based on her five-part performance piece of the same name, which won critical acclaim in its off-Broadway run. Packer is an actor, writer, teacher and the founding artistic director of Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, one of the largest and most critically acclaimed Shakespeare Festivals in North America. From January 21 to 25 at Robsham Theater, Packer will direct “Honor, Shame, and Violence: A Shakespeare Anthology Project,” a compilation of war scenes from some of Shakespeare’s most beloved and lesser-known works. Her previous books are Power Plays: Shakespeare’s Lessons in Leadership & Management, co-written with John Whitney, and the award-winning children’s book, Tales from Shakespeare.
Childhood in Irish society
A new volume co-edited by Boston College English Associate Professor James M. Smith and Maria Luddy of the University of Warwick offers significant scholarly contributions to the fields of Irish studies and childhood studies. Reflecting the interests of historians, literary critics, and the discipline of social work, the essays in Children, Childhood and Irish Society: 1500 to the Present (Four Courts Press, Dublin, 2014) examine how attitudes to children have changed in Ireland over the past half millennium. Smith is the author of Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment.
Posted in Boston College Authors
Tagged children, English Department, Ireland, Irish Studies
Leave a comment
Filming the End of the Holocaust
In his new book, Filming the End of the Holocaust: Allied Documentaries, Nuremberg and the Liberation of the Concentration Camps (Bloomsbury, 2014), Professor of Fine Arts John Michalczyk tells the story of how the US Government commissioned filmmakers to document the horrors of the concentration camps during the April-May 1945 liberation and the impact those films had the Nuremberg Trials. The evidence of the Nazis’ genocidal actions amassed in the films helped to indict Nazi officials. A noted documentary filmmaker, Michalczyk provides a thorough analysis of the footage in these films– some of them made by Hollywood luminaries such as John Ford and Billy Wilder–and their historical significance. Michalczyk used research carried out at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, the US National Archives and the film collection at the National Center for Jewish Film at Brandeis University to produce a book that explores the rationale for filming the atrocities and their use in the subsequent trials of Nazi officials in greater detail than anything previously published. BC Jesuit priest Raymond Helmick, SJ offers the book’s foreword.
Posted in Boston College Authors
Tagged film, Fine Arts Department, Holocaust, law, war, World War II
Leave a comment
Book award for Derber
Capitalism: Should You Buy It? (Paradigm Publishers, 2014) co-written by Boston College Professor of Sociology Charles Derber and Yale Magrass (University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth) has been selected as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2014 by the editors of Choice magazine, an academic library review magazine that is considered the premier guideline for library acquisitions. The prestigious list, which reflects the best in scholarly titles reviewed by Choice, is announced every year in the magazine’s January issue. The list of Outstanding Academic Titles is selective: it contains only about ten percent of the some 7,000 works reviewed in Choice each year. Capitalism was recognized in the Economics category. Derber and Magrass’ book casts a critical eye towards capitalism and questions whether it can provide a society that promotes the well-being, indeed the survival, of humanity. Derber is the author of some 20 books, including Greed to Green, Corporation Nation, Morality Wars, People Before Profit, and many more.
Posted in Awards/Honors, Boston College Authors
Tagged America, economy, Sociology Dept
Leave a comment
BC Bookmarks 