Final Engagement: A Marine’s Last Mission and the Surrender of Afghanistan (Diversion Books, 2024) is 2010 Boston College graduate Christopher Izant’s reckoning with America’s longest war, told through his team’s deadly last showdown fighting alongside Afghan forces against the Taliban. It was 2012, and with base-closure and troop-withdrawal timelines fixed by America’s top brass, the Marines had only six months to prepare the Afghan Border Police to stand on their own. Readers join then-Lieutenant Izant and the last team of Marine Corps combat advisors in the southern Helmand Province where a clash in the Afghan borderlands forebode the countrywide collapse to come. In Final Engagement, Izant describes “the impossible conditions and strategic blunders that disillusioned a generation of American service members and all but guaranteed defeat.” Izant served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 2010 to 2014. After his service, he completed a joint degree program at Harvard Law School and the Kennedy School of Government, where served as an editor-in-chief of the Harvard National Security Journal and as a co-director for the Harvard Veterans Organization.
Afghanistan and a disillusioned veteran
Posted in Alumni Authors
Tagged afghanistan, foreign policy, military, US history, war
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Tales of a newspaper woman
Elizabeth Garver Jordan was a groundbreaking journalist, suffragist, and editor who gained notoriety for her coverage of the murder trial of Lizzie Borden. She also published detective novels and short story collections such as Tales of the City Room. She became an influential editor at Harper’s Bazaar, but her fiction and journalism are mainly out of print and her reputation as writer is mostly forgotten. The Case of Lizzie Borden and Other Writings (Penguin Classics, 2024) is the first and only comprehensive collection of writings by Jordan. The publication is edited by Jane Carr and Lori Harrison-Kahan, a professor of the practice in the Boston College English Department, who hope readers see a historical trajectory from Jordan’s pioneering literary activism to the writings of contemporary journalists and novelists whose work continues to fuel discussions of gender, feminism, and crime, raising questions about who gets to tell women’s stories. Read more about the book in this story from WBUR. Harrison-Kahan also is editor of the award-winning book The Superwoman and Other Writings by Miriam Michelson and co-editor of Heirs of Yesterday by Emma Wolf.
The Big Squeeze
A new picture book from 2010 Boston College graduate Molly Harris shares a lesson about the importance of asking for help before burning out. The Big Squeeze (HarperCollins Children’s, 2024), illustrated by Alison Hawkins, tells the story of an eager sponge who absorbs everyone else’s mess until she grows soggier, heavier, stinkier—and discovers that self-care is just as important as caring for others. Kirkus Reviews calls Harris’s children’s book debut “an entertaining soak with a few suds of empathy.” Originally from Massachusetts, Harris now lives in Ireland.
How gender politics broke a party and a nation
Lauren Haumesser, a 2010 Boston College graduate, conducts a fresh examination of antebellum politics by examining the ways that gender issues and gendered discourse exacerbated fissures within the Democratic Party in her book The Democratic Collapse: How Gender Politics Broke a Party and a Nation, 1856-1861 (University of North Carolina Press). Haumesser traces how northern and southern Democrats and their partisan media organs used gender to make powerful arguments about slavery as the sectional crisis grew, from the emergence of the Republican Party to secession. Gendered charges and countercharges turned slavery into an intractable cultural debate, raising the stakes of every dispute and making compromise ever more elusive. Haumesser was a history major at BC and holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Virginia.
Posted in Alumni Authors
Tagged American history, Civil War, gender, History Department
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European studies
Gabriel Feldstein, a digital publishing and outreach specialist at O’Neill Library, has contributed a chapter to The Handbook for European Studies Librarians (University of Minnesota Libraries, 2024), edited by Brian Vetruba and Heidi Madden. It is a new open-access book that serves as a practical guide for academic librarians, library and information staff professionals, and scholars. The handbook’s authors draw upon their own expertise to help librarians without specialized knowledge of Europe and Eurasia confidently answer research queries and get up to speed on resources for collection development. Additionally, it delves into current trends in the European Studies librarianship field, as well as recommendations for diversifying library collections. Feldstein’s chapter is on “Open Access Trends in Digital Publishing.”
Words of wisdom
Boston College graduate Maria Leonard Olsen is a lawyer, journalist, and author who hosts the “Becoming Your Best Version” podcast. She shares words of wisdom from more than 75 inspiring women she has featured on her podcast in the book
On trial
Martin (Marty) Aronson, a 1958 graduate of Boston College Law School and past president of the BC Law Alumni Association, is the author of the novel, Full Courtroom Press. Set in Boston in the 1970s, Full Courtroom Press tells the story of civil trial lawyer Mike Lyons and two of his cases. Lyons’ clients are not completely forthright, creating tension and obstacles during the trials. Mysterious witnesses and unexpected bombshells provide evidentiary twists that impact the outcome of each trial. “Aronson’s storytelling ability and his uncannily remarkable technique of building suspense make this work a page-turner,” according to a book review in the Massachusetts Bar Association’s Lawyers Journal. Now retired, Aronson served as an adjunct professor at BC Law.
A philosophy of formative higher ed
What if college were not just a means of acquiring credentials and a path to a career, but a place that offered so much more? In his new book Undeclared: A Philosophy of Higher Education (MIT Press, 2024), BC Lynch School of Education and Human Development Associate Professor Chris Higgins offers an imaginative tour of the contemporary university as it could be: a place to discover self-knowledge, meaning, and purpose. Higgins is the chair of the Lynch School’s Department of Formative Education and director of the Transformative Educational Studies program. In a series of searching essays and pointed interludes, Higgins critiques the empty rhetoric of the contemporary university, and articulates a vision of what substantive formative education could be, a place to nurture whole persons striving to lead lives of meaning and purpose. Higgins is also the author of The Good Life of Teaching: An Ethics of Professional Practice.
‘Faith Beyond Justice,’ 30th anniversary
Two major congregations of the Society of Jesus—General Congregation 32 in 1975 and General Congregation 34 in 1995—formally addressed the mission of the Jesuit order. Complex changes in Church and society over the previous century made new formulations, initiatives, and reconfigurations necessary. Of paramount concern were justice-related issues. How should these be connected with the service of faith and traditional Jesuit apostolates? GC 32 was bold, but for many, it seemed all too bold. As GC 34 was looming, Martin Tripole, S.J., composed a detailed critical analysis of the GC 32’s take on the Jesuit mission, particularly as expressed in Decree 4, its famous “Faith and Justice” decree. His prophetic 1994 publication, Faith Beyond Justice: Widening the Perspective, made suggestions that would prove to be uncannily similar to those of GC 34. An updated and expanded 30th anniversary edition of Faith Beyond Justice has been published by IJS Studies – Research on Jesuits and the Society of Jesus, an imprint of Jesuit Sources. Expanding the earlier edition with a foreword, a new preface, a new chapter, three substantial appendices, an updated bibliography, and an index, this volume is for anyone interested in the recent history of the Society, its contemporary apostolic reflection, or the broader issues of faith and culture. The foreword is written by Claude Pavur, S.J., an associate editor at the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies at Boston College. Founded in 1961, Jesuit Sources specializes in preserving, maintaining, and expanding important texts and studies in Jesuit history, spirituality, and pedagogy. Since 2014, Jesuit Sources has been part of BC’s Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies.
Civil rights road trip
When 1970 Boston College graduate John (Jack) Hanrahan and his wife traveled through the South to visit sites that were connected to important events in the country’s civil rights era, they found the most recent book on civil rights travel to be outdated and lacking. So Hanrahan, who graduated from BC with a bachelor’s degree in English, decided to write one of his own. Traveling Freedom’s Road: A Guide to Exploring Our Civil Rights History combines essential travel information with a narrative about the people and events that made this era such a critical part of American history. The book covers a dozen major destinations like Montgomery, Selma, Little Rock, Birmingham, and Memphis, and their museums, historic homes, churches, and other places of interest. Fourteen Southern states from Florida to Virginia and Texas are the main focus, while historic places germane to civil rights and African American history in 24 other states are also highlighted. Traveling Freedom’s Road shines a spotlight on many less-well-known individuals involved in the fight for civil rights, especially women such as Edna Griffin, Modjeska Simkins, and Ella Baker. Book profits go to Montgomery’s Equal Justice Initiative and the Legal Aid Justice Center in Charlottesville, where Hanrahan volunteers.
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