More God, Less Crime

Posted on May 16, 2011 by Bookworm
James Q. Wilson, senior fellow at the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy at Boston College, reviews More God, Less Crime by Byron R. Johnson for the Wall Street Journal. A Presidential Medal of Freedom winner and one of the nation’s most eminent and influential scholars, Wilson is author or co-author of fourteen books, including The Marriage Problem: How Our Culture Has Weakened Families, Moral Judgment,  and The Moral Sense.
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Doesn’t time fly?

Posted on May 11, 2011 by Bookworm
Doesn’t Time Fly?, charts the history of Aer Lingus, the Irish state airline, on its 75th anniversary. Written by BC-Ireland Academic Director Mike Cronin, the book draws heavily on the company’s extensive archive of photographs, posters and advertisements, as well as the ephemera and memories of its staff. It chronicles the innovative ways in which Aer Lingus has met a plethora of challenges since 1936, and how it has always been able to adapt and transform itself.
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Idea Hunter

Posted on May 6, 2011 by Bookworm
Boston College Carroll School of Management Dean and BC alumnus Andy Boynton has co-authored a new book that challenges many of the assumptions about how great ideas— the kind that can boost careers, change organizations, and improve lives– are discovered. In The Idea Hunter: How to Find the Best Ideas and Make Them Happen, Boynton and co-author Bill Fischer show that great ideas come to those who are in the habit of looking for them — all the time.  The authors present a number of well-known idea hunters, ranging from Thomas Edison and Walt Disney to Warren Buffett and the Boston Beer Company’s Jim Koch. Listen and read more: Fox25/Boston | BC Chronicle | Inc.
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Cape Cod mystery

Posted on May 2, 2011 by Bookworm
Hide and Seek: A Murder Mystery, a Kindle book by Boston College English Department faculty member Thomas Kaplan-Maxfield, has been dubbed “a psychologically suspenseful, edge-of-your-seat page-turner that weaves together strands of the major genres of crime fiction, from British detective puzzle to American hard-boiled whodunit, from old Miss Marple detective to Nancy Drew girl-sleuth, from scientist and doctor to patient, from priest to sinner.” Set on Cape Cod in the 1980s, Hide and Seek presents a murder mystery backwards, with the identity of the murderer known to readers.
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More authors at the Arts Festival

Posted on April 29, 2011 by Bookworm
Authors Janet Costa Bates and Erin Dionne will be featured Saturday during the Arts Festival. Dionne, a graduate from the Class of 1997, will read from her book, Total Tragedy of a Girl Named Hamlet.  Bates, who works at BC’s Career Center, will read her children’s book Seaside Dream. Details.
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Arts Festival literary events

Posted on April 27, 2011 by Bookworm
In addition to music, song and dance, the Boston College Arts Festival is a celebration of the literary arts. In the spotlight this year are senior English majors in the Creative Writing Concentration and faculty writers who will read their fiction, poetry or creative nonfiction. Faculty scheduled to appear are: Maxim D. Shrayer, John M. Anderson, Suzanne Matson, Elizabeth Graver, Carlo Rotella, Bob Chibka, Susana Roberts, Michael C. Keith, Paul Doherty and Christopher Boucher. A detailed schedule is available on the Arts Festival website.
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Hogan at Arts Festival

Posted on April 26, 2011 by Bookworm
Author and alumnus Chuck Hogan will return to campus this week to take part in the University’s annual Arts Festival, where he will be honored for his artistic achievement. Hogan is the author of several books, including Prince of Thieves, which was adapted into the film “The Town” starring Ben Affleck. Hogan will be interviewed for an event (Apr. 28, 4:30 p.m., Devlin Hall 101) called “Inside the BC Studio,” modeled after Bravo TV’s show “Inside the Actors Studio.” At 7 p.m. there will be a screening of “The Town” followed by a Q&A and book signing with Hogan. On Friday, Apr. 29, Hogan will discuss “Prince of Thieves and The Town: A Boston Crime Story as Novel and Movie” at 7 p.m. in Devlin Hall 101 for the Lowell Humanities Series. For details, check out the Arts Festival website.
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Women and post-war Bosnia

Posted on April 25, 2011 by Bookworm
Boston College Professor of Slavic and Eastern Languages Cynthia Simmons published “Women Engaged/Engaged Art in Postwar Bosnia: Reconciliation, Recovery, and Civil Society” in The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, a scholarly paper series published by the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Russian and East European Studies. She talks about her research on postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina and the recasting of women’s roles in public life in this video from the Boston College Libraries.
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Review of The Case for Lebanon

Posted on April 21, 2011 by Bookworm
Language Memory and Identity in the Middle East: The Case for Lebanon by Boston College Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Arabic, and Hebrew Franck Salameh was reviewed by Professor Mordechai Nisan of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the Spring 2011 issue of the Middle East Quarterly (Volume 18, Number 2).   Here is an excerpt: “The essence of Salameh’s thesis is that langauge–one rooted in the distant past and leavened with a multiplicity of more contemporary influences–continues to leave its imprint both on how the Lebanese communicate in the popular domain but also on what makes Lebanon the extraordinary human venture it is.  […] Salameh’s meticulous research makes for a most worthy book that makes a significant contribution to the literature.  His study elucidates a core aspect of national identity with repercussions for all the Arabic-speaking countries.  The author questions a conventional and sanctified concept of an Arab world which, battered and bruised by internecine political rivalries and animosities, is as desiccated as a Middle Eastern desert in the heat of summer.” Read the full review.
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Lucky Grossman

Posted on April 19, 2011 by Bookworm
Vasily Grossman had been one of the principal voices of anti-Nazi resistance, a legendary journalist who spent 1000 days at the front during World War II. When he died in 1964, a month before the removal of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, he had already been devastated by the efforts of the Soviet regime to delete him from history. The Road, a new collection of Grossman’s shorter prose that presents a retrospective of the writer’s career, is reviewed by BC Professor of Russian and English Maxim D. Shrayer in the Spring 2011 issue of the Jewish Review of Books Review (click on “Lucky Grossman” headline to see text).
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