Educator and race scholar OiYan Poon’s new book Asian American Is Not a Color: Conversations on Race, Affirmative Action, and Family (Beacon Press, 2024) is inspired by her daughter’s questions about race and racism. Poon conducted interviews with Asian Americans throughout the U.S. who have been actively engaged in policy debates over race-conscious admissions and looks at how the debate over affirmative action reveals the divergent ways Asian Americans conceive of their identity. Poon combines extensive research with personal narratives from both herself and others across the Asian American community to respond to the question: “What does it mean to be Asian American?” A 1998 Boston College graduate, Poon cites an influential class taught by BC Professor Emeritus Ramsay Liem in her book. Poon is co-director of the College Admissions Futures Co-Laborative and a senior research fellow for education equity at the NAACP LDF Thurgood Marshall Institute. Her work has appeared widely in media outlets including the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the New Yorker. She was born and raised in Massachusetts to immigrants from Hong Kong.
Asian American is Not A Color
A culture of readiness
Strategic Corporate Crisis Management: Building an Unconquerable Organization (Routledge, 2022) challenges the notion that corporate crisis teams can be expected to swoop in and “save the day.” The book’s author, Brendan Monahan, says the role of the crisis team should be to advance a culture of readiness across an organization, and to foster leadership and crisis competency where it’s needed, when it’s needed. A 2000 Boston College graduate, Monahan is a security intelligence and crisis professional with 20 years of experience leading organizations through crisis and incident response. In his book, he presents an alternative to traditional models of centralized crisis management, making the case for decentralizing crisis response and building resilience where it matters most. He also provides an accessible, pragmatic approach for doing so.
Touched by This Place
In his new book, Touched By This Place (Orbis Books, 2024), Benjamín Valentín encourages readers to recognize how place—the geographical place in which we live and move and have our being—affects and molds human thought, experience, memory, identity, and activity. In Touched By This Place, Valentín focuses mostly on the subject of recognizing the epistemic significiance or the epistemic contributions of place. Valentin adds his own personal story of place: New York City’s East Harlem, where he grew up and lived for 27 years. He hopes his book encourages interest in scholars to further explore the potential contributions of place-based studies within theology. A cross-disciplinary scholar, Valentín is a professor of theology and Latinx studies at Boston College’s Clough School of Theology and Ministry.
An Innkeeper’s Memoir
It sounds like the premise of a movie or a novel: A couple ditches corporate life and buys and restores an inn on the coast of Maine. In actuality, it’s the real life story of 1986 Boston College grad Teri Anderholm and her husband Jeff, the former innkeepers of Bass Cottage Inn in Bar Harbor, Maine. Anderholm chronicles the highs and lows of their two decades of innkeeping in Inn Mates: An Innkeeper’s Memoir (Maine Authors Publishing, 2024). Inn Mates follows the couple as they restore the dilapidated, four-story Victorian inn into a grand place, hosting a parade of guests who teach them lessons of gratitude, humility, love, and laughter. Inn Mates was named a finalist in the category of Nonfiction: Creative in the American Book Fest’s 2024 International Book Awards. Watch an interview with Teri Anderholm on News Center Maine.
Afghanistan and a disillusioned veteran
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.
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
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