In her latest book, Sharing Risk: The Path to Economic Well-Being for All (University of California Press, 2025) Liberty Mutual Insurance Professor of Law Patricia McCoy probes explanations as to why financial burdens have shifted onto the backs of individual U.S. families over the past 60 years. She examines how businesses and governments have slowly widened the wealth gap, and presents policy recommendations on risk sharing that would build a more equitable financial system. McCoy’s research is at the intersections of financial regulation, consumer protection, and economic justice. She is a founder of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. More from Boston College Law School Magazine.
Pooling the financial risk
Posted in Boston College Authors
Tagged Boston College Law School, economic inequality
Leave a comment
What’s your sign?
After a distressing astrology reading, science-minded skeptic Leah Lockhart is on a mission to prove that her horoscope is wrong in the latest novel by Boston College graduate Jessie Rosen. In All the Signs (G.P. Putnam’s Sons/Penguin Random House, 2025), Lockhart sets off to find people born under her exact same star map, in order to compare their lives and choices. Her journey takes her to Venice, Istanbul, New Orleans, and beyond. Along the way, Lockhart starts to question everything she believes in. Rosen is a writer, producer, educator, and speaker. Her previous novel was the USA Today bestseller The Heirloom.
Girls with Goals
Girls and women have always found a way to play soccer, in spite of bans, challenges, rules, and backward-looking attitudes. Today, soccer is the most popular women’s sport in the world. A new YA book by Boston College alumna Clelia Castro-Malaspina chronicles the history of women’s soccer from its birth in 19th century England to its rise as a global powerhouse. Girls with Goals (Holler/Quarto, 2025) has been described as “a love letter” to women’s soccer and the female athletes who have inspired girls all over the world. Kirkus Reviews calls Girls with Goals “a spirited, well-told success story” with a “vivid narrative.” Castro-Malaspina is the founder of Mossy Pines Creative, a children’s book editorial business, and the author of Your Freedom, Your Power: A Kid’s Guide to the First Amendment.
Posted in Alumni Authors
Tagged athletes, nonfiction, soccer, sports, women's history
Leave a comment
‘Parallel Letters’
Parallel Letters (Parallel’noe Pis’mo) (Sandermoen Publishing, 2025), a new bilingual collection of poems by Boston College Professor of Russian, English, and Jewish Studies Maxim D. Shrayer, showcases twin texts that were born from the same sources, but occupy different linguistic and cultural spaces: Russian and English. The title of the collection was drawn from Shrayer’s “parallel writing” process: his principal method of creating literary texts over the past three years. The volume’s 38 poems—written from 2020–2024—primarily focus on immigrant memory among those from the former Soviet Union now living in the United States, Israel, and Europe; the Soviet legacy; and the wars in Ukraine and Israel. Read more from BC News.
A fortune and a curse
The latest book from bestselling author Jen Calonita is about a girl who will inherit a mysterious fortune if she can break a centuries-old curse. In Isle of Ever, Everly “Benny” Benedict learns she’s the heir to a fortune, but to collect the inheritance she first has to play―and win―a game. If she fails, the fortune will be forfeited. Isle of Ever is book one of an expected series. Calonita is a Boston College graduate whose popular books for middle grade readers and young adults have been translated into 15 languages. Her publications include Fairy Godmother, 12 to 22, and many titles in Disney’s Twisted Tale series and the Fairy Tale Reform School series. Isle of Ever received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and School Library Journal.
Coercive Commerce
In 1842, the Qing Empire signed a watershed commercial treaty with Great Britain, beginning a century-long period in which geopolitical and global economic entanglements intruded on Qing territory and governance. Previously understood as an era of “semi-colonialism,” Boston College Assistant Professor of History Stacie A. Kent reframes this “treaty period” by shedding light on the generative force of global capital. Based on extensive research conducted with British and Chinese government archives, Kent’s book, Coercive Commerce: Global Capital and Imperial Governance at the End of the Qing Empire (Hong Kong University Press, 2024), shows how commercial treaties and the regulatory regime that grew out of them catalyzed a revised arts of governance in Qing-administered China. Kent contends that Qing administrators alternately resisted and adapted to this new reality by reorganizing Chinese territory into a space where global circuits of capital could circulate and reproduce at an ever greater scale. Kent, who teaches in the University’ International Studies program, specializes in global capitalism in imperial and post-colonial contexts.
Posted in Boston College Authors
Tagged Asian history, capitalism, China, History Department
Leave a comment
McAleer’s Henry von Stray is on the case
Late Boston College alumnus and Professor of English John McAleer ’45 created the literary characters Henry von Stray, a London private detective, and his collaborator, Professor John Dilpate, during the 1930s—a period known as Golden Age of detective fiction. A surviving Henry von Stray story, “The Case of the Illustrious Banker,” was discovered after McAleer’s death and published for the first time in 2022. One of McAleer’s sons, Andrew McAleer, has extended the Henry von Stray stories, with three new mysteries: “The Big Push and Legend of Sir Morleans’ Lost Pearls”; “A Little Birdie Tells Von Stray”; and “Von Stray and the Five-Fingered Fraudster.” The stories by both McAleers (father and son) have been published in the first full-book collection of von Stray stories titled, A Casebook of Crime (Level Best Books, 2025). John McAleer was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for his biography of Rex Stout. An author and editor, Andrew McAleer is a 1990 Boston College alumnus who also taught at Boston College. Learn more in this blog post by Andrew McAleer.
Spenser is back
Spenser, considered Boston’s most famous fictional private investigator, takes on a new case that hits close to home in Robert B. Parker’s Hot Property (G.P. Putnam’s Sons/Penguin Random House, 2024), written by Boston College alumnus Mike Lupica. The novel opens with news that Rita Fiore, a lawyer and friend of Spenser, has been shot. There’s no shortage of suspects who might want to enact revenge on Fiore. Spenser must get to the bottom of things, even if it means unearthing some unsavory secrets. Hot Property is the 52nd book in the Spenser series, which was originated by the late Robert B. Parker. Lupica is a sports journalist and bestselling author of more than 40 works of fiction and nonfiction. He was interviewed about Hot Property and his love of Boston by MassLive.
Mighty Monk Mysteries
Professor of Theology Emeritus Harvey D. Egan, S.J., a 50-year member of the Boston College Jesuit community, is the inspiration for Father Ignatius Lacroix, the reluctant detective in the new Mighty Monk Mysteries book series by D. Ansgar Nyberg, in which an aging Jesuit scholar matches wits with a variety of evildoers. Much like G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown and others in the clerical-investigator literary tradition, Fr. Lacroix doesn’t act in an official capacity; quite the contrary. He is intent on his teaching, research, and pastoral activities when—as is so often the case with amateur sleuths—a body gets in the way. The series’ first book, In Lent, The Cardinal Quit Singing, confronts Fr. Lacroix with the murder of a high-ranking ecclesiastical official at a retreat center, a situation rendered all the more chilling for its setting amid an ice storm. The priest’s analytical skills are tested anew in No Rest for the Wicked, in which he must connect the dots between two mysterious deaths occurring seven years apart, and yet again in The Silence of St. Bernard, in which he must unravel a web of deceit surrounding an abbey’s prized relic. Fr. Egan is a renowned expert on Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner and author of several books on Christian mysticism and other topics. Read more from BC News about how Fr. Egan and author D. Ansgar Nyberg are connected.
Confession
For generations, American Catholics went faithfully to confession, admitting their sins to a priest and accepting through him God’s forgiveness. The sacrament served as a distinctive marker of Catholic identity. But starting in the 1970s, many abandoned confession altogether. In a new book, James M. O’Toole, Charles I. Clough Millennium Professor of History Emeritus and University Historian at Boston College, reconstructs the history of confession’s steady rise―and dramatic fall―among American Catholics, focusing on the experiences of both laypeople and priests. O’Toole’s previous publications include The Faithful: A History of Catholics in America. More from BC News.
BC Bookmarks 