“BC grad” Jack Ryan returns

Best-selling author Tom Clancy didn’t attend Boston College, but Jack Ryan, the central character in many of Clancy’s novels, did.  Ryan, a CIA operative who ascended to the presidency of the United States over a two decades-long series of Tom Clancy techno-action novels, returns in Clancy’s latest work, Dead or Alive.
Clancy is believed to have modeled his Jack Ryan character after a real-life high school friend who went on to attend Boston College in the mid-1960s and then became a U.S. Navy helicopter pilot in Vietnam.
Readers first met Ryan in 1984 in Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October. In Dead or Alive, Ryan is mulling a campaign to return to the White House, while at the same heading up a covert effort to find the world’s most wanted terrorist.
As is the case in almost all of his works, Clancy includes a reference to Boston College, Ryan’s alma mater, in the text. Midway through Dead or Alive, Ryan savors BC’s recent football successes against Notre Dame.
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Event rescheduled

Notice: Tonight’s appearance by author Mikey Weinstein has been rescheduled to Tuesday, Feb. 15 at 7:00 p.m. in Devlin Hall, room 101.
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Irish writer Anne Enright coming to campus

Novelist Anne Enright, winner of the 2007 Man Booker Prize for The Gathering, will speak on Feb. 9  in Devlin Hall, room 008 at 7 p.m. Enright also has received the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Harper’s, The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, and The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction. She is also the author of Yesterday’s Weather (short stories), The Pleasures of Eliza Lynch, What Are You Like? The Wig My Father Wore and The Portable Virgin (short stories).  Her talk is part of the Irish Studies program’s Irish Writers Series.
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Breaking News: Skloot event postponed

Rebecca Skloot’s reading scheduled for Tuesday, Feb. 8 has been postponed. According to a Winston Center email: A medical emergency has forced Rebecca Skloot to postpone several events this week, including her visit to Boston College.  Ms. Skloot says she is very much looking forward to speaking at BC, and we’re working to reschedule the event.  We apologize for any inconvenience, and we hope to announce a new date soon.

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Military religious freedom

Mikey Weinstein, founding president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation and author of With God on Our Side: One Man’s War Against an Evangelical Coup in America’s Military, will speak at BC on Feb. 9 at 7 p.m. in Devlin 101. Weinstein’s book chronicles his 2005 suit against the U.S. Air Force for permitting evangelical Christian officers to proselytize troops. One of three generations of military academy graduates, Weinstein served for 10 years as a Judge Advocate General. The event is sponsored by the Office of Marketing Communications.
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Talk by best-selling author Rebecca Skloot

Rebecca Skloot, author of the best-selling book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, will talk and sign copies of her book on Feb. 8 at 7 p.m. in the Yawkey Center. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is about the legacy of a 31-year-old black mother of five who died of cervical cancer in 1951, and whose cancerous cells—taken without her knowledge—launched a biomedical revolution. Skloot is a science writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, O, The Oprah Magazine, Discover and many other publications.
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BC student is published illustrator

Check out the Boston College Chronicle story on BC junior Rachel Gregorio who has  illustrated two children’s books, Basketball with Big Baby and Pitching with the Papelbons.
Gregorio has also applied her creative talents to many Boston College projects. She designed posters for Professor of English Paul Lewis’ Edgar Allan Poe exhibit at the Boston Public Library and for the “Lights Out” campaign for the BConserves energy conservation initiative.  She is the BC Theater Department photographer and the junior editor-in-chief of the BC yearbook, Sub Turri. She also served as assistant graphics editor on The Heights, the independent student newspaper of Boston College.
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Wave: A poet’s debut volume

The winner of numerous poetry awards, Boston College English Department Associate Professor Andrew Sofer has written Wave, his first book of poems. Named a finalist for the Morse Prize, the Donald Justice Award and the New Criterion Prize, Wave is described by acclaimed poet Linda Gregerson  as “dense with the lived joys and sorrows that might easily, in lesser hands, amount to dissonance. But Andrew Sofer, in this fine and remarkably mature first book, has found their richer temper.”
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Congrats to Blair & Bloom

Congratulations to Norma Jean Calderwood University Professors of Islamic and Asian Art Sheila Blair and Jonathan Bloom, winners of the World Prize for the Book of the Year by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the field of Islamic Studies. The professors are being recognized for their three-volume Grove Encyclopedia of Islamic Art and Architecture, published in 2009 by Oxford University Press.  The award will be presented to Blair and Bloom at a ceremony in Tehran on February 8.
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Deep Down True

Deep Down True, the latest novel by BC alumna Juliette Fay, will hit bookshelves next week. Juliette has a number of book events both in Massachusetts and across the country in the coming days. According to the publisher, Deep Down True is the story of newly divorced Dana Stellgarten who finds that the tension between being true to yourself and being liked doesn’t end in middle school… and that sometimes it takes a real friend to help you embrace adulthood in all its flawed complexity. Listen to Juliette talk about her new book.
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