In Marrying the Ketchups (Knopf/Penguin Random House, 2022), best-selling author Jennifer Close introduces readers to Bud Sullivan, proprietor of a Chicago-area restaurant/bar called JP Sullivans. The novel takes places during a tumultuous time and focuses on three of Bud’s grandchildren (Gretchen, Jane, and Teddy) as they each approach a crossroad. The book is a mix of humor, baseball, politics, love, and family. According to a New York Times review: “One other thing worth noting about Marrying the Ketchups is the trick Close has of taking what might otherwise be an ordinary exchange between ordinary family members and somehow making it riveting.” Close is a Boston College graduate and author of Girls in White Dresses, The Smart One, and The Hopefuls.
Marrying the Ketchups
Working like a dog
Boston College graduate Margaret Cardillo has published a picture book about the real jobs dogs can have. Dogs at Work (Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins, 2021), illustrated by Zachariah OHora, is a fun and educational read about the work that dogs—such as therapy dogs—do to help humans. Cardillo is also the author of the children’s books Just Being Jackie and Just Being Audrey.
Censorship in Thatcher’s Britain
“The ease with which censorship became part of the political and broadcasting culture of the United Kingdom and Ireland is a lesson in the fragility of democracy,” writes Boston College Interim Director of Irish Studies Robert Savage in the Irish Times. Savage explores how the British government, under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, attempted to control the narrative of the Northern Ireland “Troubles” through manipulation of the British and Irish media in the new book, Northern Ireland, the BBC, and Censorship in Thatcher’s Britain (Oxford University Press, 2022). Thatcher mistrusted the broadcast media, especially the BBC, believing it to be biased and hostile to her interests and policies, particularly in regard to Northern Ireland. The Thatcher government was determined to shape a narrative of the Troubles, presenting it as a fight between the democratic forces of law and order and ruthless terrorists hell-bent on carnage and chaos. Programming that questioned this paradigm by challenging the decisions, policies, and tactics of politicians, civil servants, and the army provoked outrage by the government over how the conflict was presented at home and abroad. In 1988, the Thatcher Government imposed formal censorship on the British broadcast media. The “broadcasting ban” lasted six years, successfully silencing the voices of Irish republicans while tarnishing the reputation of the United Kingdom as a leading global democracy, according to Savage. A professor of the practice in BC’s History Department, Savage also is the author of The BBC’s ‘Irish Troubles’: Television, Conflict and Northern Ireland and A Loss of Innocence?: Television and Irish Society, 1960-72, among other works.
Posted in Boston College Authors
Tagged Britain, Ireland, Irish Studies, media, Northern Ireland
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Sci-fi story of survival
When Earth Shall Be No More (Secant Publishing, 2022) is a debut sci-fi thriller from husband and wife writing team Paul Awad and Kathryn O’Sullivan, a Boston College graduate. In their story, environmental scientist Constance Roy is one of 49 refugees rescued from Earth’s destruction and transported to the ark spaceship Orb by an automaton race called the Curators. But now the ship’s orbit is decaying and the refugees seem doomed to crash into Jupiter. In a parallel universe on present-day Earth, another version of Constance seeks answers to the questions that have haunted her since childhood. The two time-streams collide when the Constance on Earth discovers that Nicolas, her son, has the ability to save the Orb and its inhabitants. O’Sullivan is a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and educator. Her previous novels are Foal Play, Murder on the Hoof, and Neighing with Fire.
A theology for the pilgrim church
BC School of Theology and Ministry Professor Rev. Richard Lennan explores the possibilities for a more faithful, just, and creative church—one responsive to the movement of grace—in his new book Tilling the Church: Theology for an Unfinished Project (Liturgical Press, 2022). Commonweal magazine editors write of Tilling the Church: “A farmer tills the soil when he notices that it needs to be renewed, enabling it to best bear fruit. Just the same, the Church must constantly be attentive to movements of grace so that it can be cultivated for fruitfulness. Open to the echoes of Vatican II and aligned with the mission of Pope Francis…Tilling the Church lays out an ecclesiology for today. The Church is an unfinished project, [Lennan] writes, constantly tilled by grace through the Holy Spirit—that is, made more authentic, aided in its growth, and formed truer to its mission. The Church must be self-critical and responsive in order to actualize this tilling. As times change and the Spirit moves, so too must the Church continually respond and convert.” Fr. Lennan is a priest of the diocese of Maitland-Newcastle (Australia). He served as co-editor of two publications authored by School of Theology and Ministry faculty, The Holy Spirit: Setting the World on Fire and Hope: Promise, Possibility, and Fulfillment.
Posted in Boston College Authors
Tagged Catholic Church, School of Theology and Ministry
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The Sultan of Swat
Boston College alumna Jenna Grodzicki introduces young readers to George Herman (Babe) Ruth, Jr. in her new book, The Story of Babe Ruth (Rockridge Press, 2021). The book takes readers back to Babe’s early years as a poor kid growing up in Baltimore and often getting into trouble. It follows his story to the baseball diamond where he has legendary career as perhaps the greatest baseball player of all time. Grodzicki, who graduated from the Lynch School of Education and Human Development in 2001, also has written a biography for young readers about Princess Diana.
South Korea’s democratic transition
Human Rights and Transnational Democracy in South Korea (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), written by Assistant Professor of the Practice in International Studies Ingu Hwang, offers the first account of the historical intersection between South Korea’s democratic transition and the global human rights boom in the 1970s. Drawing on previously unused or underutilized archival sources, Human Rights and Transnational Democracy in South Korea shows how local pro-democracy activists pragmatically engaged with global advocacy groups, especially Amnesty International and the World Council of Churches, to maximize their socioeconomic and political struggles against the backdrop of South Korea’s authoritarian industrialization and U.S. hegemony in East Asia. Hwang details how local pro-democracy protesters were able to translate their sufferings and causes into international human rights claims that highlighted how U.S. Cold War geopolitics impeded democratization in South Korea. Hwang, whose expertise is on modern Korean history and politics, is also a faculty board member of the Asian Studies Program.
Posted in Boston College Authors
Tagged Asian Studies, human rights, International Studies, Korea
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Overshadowed scientist
Boston College graduate Marie Benedict is known for writing novels that shine a light on the untold stories of important—and often overshadowed—women, including Hedy Lamarr, Clementine Churchill, Agatha Christie, Mileva Marić (wife of Albert Einstein), and Belle da Costa Greene (personal librarian for J.P Morgan). Benedict’s newest publication, Her Hidden Genius (Sourcebooks Landmark, 2022), tells the story of Rosalind Franklin, a chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose role in the discovery of the structure of DNA has often been overlooked. Franklin’s work on the X-ray diffraction images of DNA led to the discovery of the DNA double helix. After her death, scientists Francis Crick, James Watson, and Maurice Wilkins would go on to share the Nobel Prize. Benedict spoke about her book with Entertainment Weekly.
British America’s trade history
Historian Thomas M. Truxes presents a sweeping history of early American trade and the foundation of the American economy in his new book, The Overseas Trade of British America: A Narrative History (Yale University Press, 2021). Born from seeds planted in Tudor England in the 16th century, Atlantic trade allowed the initial survival, economic expansion, and later prosperity of British America, and brought vastly different geographical regions, each with a distinctive identity and economic structure, into a single fabric. Truxes, a 1963 graduate of the Carroll School of Management, shows how colonial American prosperity was only possible because of the labor of enslaved Africans, how the colonial economy became dependent on free and open markets, and how the young United States owed its survival in the struggle of the American Revolution to Atlantic trade. Truxes is a clinical professor of Irish studies and history at New York University. He is the author of Irish-American Trade, 1660–1783 and Defying Empire: Trading with the Enemy in Colonial New York, among other books.
Pope Benedict and German Enlightenment
The lifelong engagement of Josef Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) with the German Enlightenment and its contemporary manifestations and heirs is the subject of a new book written by Fr. Maurice Ashley Agbaw-Ebai, who recently earned a doctorate in philosophy from Boston College. Contemporary European disdain for organized religion and the rise in secularism has deep roots in the German Enlightenment. In Light of Reason, Light of Faith: Joseph Ratzinger and the German Enlightenment (St. Augustine Press, 2021), Fr. Agbaw-Ebai demonstrates how Ratzinger’s extraordinary and sympathetic understanding of the sources of contemporary secularism equipped him to appreciate the gains of the Enlightenment, while still being a fierce critic of the losses humanity has suffered when reason falsely excludes faith. A native of Cameroon, Fr. Agbaw-Ebai is also a graduate of Boston College’s School of Theology and Ministry.
Posted in Alumni Authors, Boston College Authors
Tagged Europe, Germany, Philosophy Department, Pope Benedict
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