Author Dave Evans will deliver the keynote address at First Year Academic Convocation on September 6 at 7 p.m. in Conte Forum. Evans is the co-author of Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life (Knopf, 2016)—the Class of 2022’s common read distributed to incoming first-year students at orientation. Co-written with Bill Burnett, Designing Your Life is based on the authors’ popular Stanford University undergraduate course on navigating moral, ethical, and foundational choices in careers and lives. Through anecdotes, psychology, and thought experiments, the book helps students conscientiously and rigorously answer “Big Questions” such as “How do I find a job that I like or maybe even love?” “How do I balance my career with my family?” And “How can I make a difference in the world?” Read more. | Designing Your Life official website
Designing Your Life
Jack Ryan
Boston College “alumnus” Jack Ryan, a character created by the late best-selling author Tom Clancy, returns to the screen as the title hero of the new Amazon Prime series “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan.” Ryan, a CIA analyst, is played by Newton, Mass. native John Krasinski, perhaps best known for his role as Jim Halpert in “The Office.” Jack Ryan appeared in many of Clancy’s books, including The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger, and The Sum of All Fears, among others. Clancy is believed to have based the Jack Ryan character on a high school friend who attended BC and became a U.S. Navy helicopter pilot in Vietnam. The first season of the series is available beginning August 31. More from BC News
A poet’s story
Lynne Spigelmire Viti, a Boston College graduate, reflects on her family history in her newly published poetry collection titled The Glamorganshire Bible (Finishing Line Press, 2018). Viti is also the author of Baltimore Girls, a poetry collection published last year, and a microchapbook, Punting, from Origami Poems Project. A Baltimore native, Viti is a faculty emerita lecturer in the Writing Program at Wellesley College, where she taught writing-intensive courses in bioethics, legal studies, literature, media studies, and journalism. She earned both a PhD in English and a law degree from Boston College. Her poetry, nonfiction, and fiction has appeared in more than 100 online and print journals and anthologies, including The Wire: Urban Decay and American Television, The Baltimore Sun, Gargoyle, Constellations, Amuse-Bouche, The Paterson Review, The Little Patuxent Review, Drunk Monkeys, Cultured Vultures, Incandescent Mind, and Right Hand Pointing. She won honorable mentions in the 2017 WOMR/Joe Gouveia Outermost Poetry Contest, the 2015 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Contest, and the 2015 Glimmer Train Short Fiction Contest. Read an interview with Viti in WickedLocal Westwood.
Encyclopedia of Buddhist Art
The first comprehensive reference collection of Buddhist art—an invaluable resource for students and scholars alike—is now housed at BC’s Bapst Library. The 22-volume English language Encyclopedia of Buddhist Art was donated earlier this year to the Boston College Libraries by the Fo Guang Shan Buddhist Temple in Cambridge. The featured works of art come from more than 30 countries. “These beautifully designed volumes cover such subjects as architecture, caves and rock carving, sculpture, painting, decorative art, calligraphy, and more, and include more than ten thousand color illustrations,” said Nina Bogdanovsky, senior research librarian/bibliographer at O’Neill Library. More from BC News.
The woman behind the famous name
Boston College grad Margaret Cardillo’s new children’s book takes a look at the life of the late Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. In Just Being Jackie (Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins, 2018), Cardillo highlights not only the style and grace of the former first lady, but also her work as a journalist, a preservationist, and an editor of award-winning books. This is the second picture book by Cardillo and illustrator Julia Denos, whose first book was the award-winning Just Being Audrey, about Audrey Hepburn. A former children’s book editor, Cardillo now teaches screenwriting at the University of Miami.
Bayles on The Big Picture
BC faculty member Martha Bayles offers her take on the new book The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies by entertainment journalist Ben Fritz in a piece for The American Interest. She writes that The Big Picture “offers a lively, readable account of a profound transformation taking place in the U.S. entertainment industry: namely, the collapse of the self-contained narrative film that for the last 100 years has defined the art and business of the cinema, and the massive shift of cultural weight and influence from movies to television—or more accurately, to the multi-part dramatic series that was originally developed for broadcast television but has now migrated to digital streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu.” According to Bayles, Fritz’s narrative on movies and entertainment as products of commerce is compelling, but he is less cogent when addressing the cultural and artistic significance of the changes in the classic American moviegoing experience. Bayles is the author of the book Through a Screen Darkly: Popular Culture, Public Diplomacy, and America’s Image Abroad.
The GOAT
Publishers Weekly calls the new book from the writing team of Casey Sherman and Dave Wedge an “astute history of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady’s 2016 Super Bowl–winning season.” Sherman and Wedge, a Boston College alumnus, are the authors of 12: The Inside Story of Tom Brady’s Fight for Redemption (Little, Brown and Company, 2018), which chronicles Brady’s story from the fallout of the so-called “Deflategate” controversy to the greatest Super Bowl comeback of all time. With unprecedented access to Brady, his teammates, and his lawyers, the authors recount how the future Hall-of-Famer went up against one of the largest corporations in the world in a real-life drama that unfolded in the locker room, the court room, and in the Super Bowl. Sherman and Wedge are also the authors of The Ice Bucket Challenge: Pete Frates and the Fight against ALS, about BC grad Pete Frates, and Boston Strong: A City’s Triumph over Tragedy, which was adapted into the feature film “Patriots Day.” Boston 25 News | Parade magazine
Privacy is endangered
An executive’s corpse is discovered in a Minneapolis wetland, and with it the photo of a girl. Is she unconscious or dead? Detectives Erik Jansson and Deb Metzger take on the investigation in a new book by Boston College alumna Priscilla Paton. In Where Privacy Dies (Coffeetown Press, 2018), Paton spins a mystery where intensely private and deadly secrets come to light. A retired college professor, Paton earned a Ph.D in English from BC in 1979. She is the author of a children’s book, Howard and the Sitter Surprise, and a book on Robert Frost and Andrew Wyeth, Abandoned New England. She says she picked up the mystery habit through her husband David Anderson, a graduate assistant for BC Professor John McAleer while McAleer was writing a biography of Rex Stout.
Mothering from afar
What happens to families when Mexican mothers migrate to the U.S. in search of jobs and opportunities and leave their children behind? In her new book, Boston College Lynch School of Education Assistant Professor Gabrielle Oliveira offers a perspective on the consequences of maternal migration, based on more than three years of ethnographic research. Motherhood across Borders: Immigrants and Their Children in Mexico and New York (NYU Press, 2018) provides insights on the far-reaching effects on both the children who accompanied their mothers to the U.S., and those who remain in Mexico.
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Tagged children, Lynch School of Education, Mexico, migration, parenting
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A killing in Washington
BC alumna Colleen J. Shogan has published K Street Killing (Camel Press, 2018), book four in her Washington Whodunit mystery series. The series follows the adventures of Kit Marshall, a congressional staffer whose life often intersects with mystery and murder. In K Street Killing, a powerful lobbyist mysteriously dies at a fundraising event for Kit’s boss, who is in the throes of a tough campaign for relection to Congress. Shogan’s previous books include Stabbing in the Senate, a 2016 Next Generation Indie Book Award for “Best Mystery,” Homicide in the House and Calamity at the Continental Club. Shogan works at the Library of Congress. The Hill | Roll Call
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