Author to Sign Books Saturday in RC

Brian Toolan, Class of 1972, will be on campus Saturday to sign copies of his book “Snubbed,” the season-long chronicle of St. Bonaventure’s omission from the 2016 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament.

Toolan will be signing copies of his book from 1 to 4 p.m. outside the SBU Bookstore. The Bonnies host Duquesne at 4 p.m. in the Reilly Center Arena that day.

Friday morning, Toolan will speak to the students who staff TAPinto Greater Olean as part of Anne and Richard Lee’s Journalists’ Workshop class. Friday. He also will be doing a podcast about his book with one of the Journalists’ Workshop students after the class.

Toolan had a 43-year career as a newspaper reporter and editor, including as senior vice president and editor of the Hartford Courant when it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999.

“Snubbed: A Basketball Season of Triumph, Crisis and Despair at St. Bonaventure University,” looks back at an Atlantic 10 championship year for the third-smallest college in NCAA Division I. His reporting began months ahead of the season’s tipoff, not long after the university had reaffirmed its commitment to remain a Division I program.

Amid this tumult, Coach Mark Schmidt prepared his team for the school’s 96th season of men’s basketball. It began with injuries depleting the roster and resulted in adjustments to the style of play. The Bonnies were predicted to finish eighth in the A-10 by league coaches.

Granting Toolan generous access, Schmidt, frank and strikingly unvarnished, is the book’s key figure. The soaring performances that resulted in a share of the conference championship and the crushing process that denied the Bonnies an NCAA Tournament bid are recounted in a manner difficult to achieve in daily coverage of any season.

“Snubbed” is published by NFBPublishing in Buffalo and is available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powell’s Books, NFBPublishing.com, Dog Ears bookstore, Talking Leaves bookstore and other outlets.

Book Explores AI, Theology

A St. Bonaventure University faculty member’s research on religious and ethical questions about artificial intelligence is the subject of a new book by a Spanish priest and educator.

“Anne Foerst: The Religious Dimension of the Search for Artificial Intelligence,” by Francisco José Génova Omedes, has been published in Spain.

The intersection of theology and artificial intelligence has been a lifelong research interest of Dr. Anne Foerst, an associate professor of computer science and director of the Individualized Major program at St. Bonaventure. Foerst, who’s also a theologian and an internationally known expert on human-robot interaction, is the author of “God in the Machine: What Robots Teach Us About God and Humanity,” a book that examines what robots can teach us about being human.

During a postdoctoral fellowship at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Foerst was a researcher at the institution’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and director of MIT’s God and Computers project, where she served as theological adviser to scientists who tried to build robots with social skills.

Génova’s analysis and book, based on Foerst’s time spent at MIT, looks at what challenges developments in artificial and robotic intelligence mean for theology.

He places technology in the center of what it means to be human from a philosophical and theological perspective and, in doing so, writes how AI and robotics were not born in the 20th century but are rooted in the origin itself of humankind. Génova also explores how many of the challenges theologians face today converge in the fields of AI and robotics.

“We are confronted with the fact that robots can have social skills,” said Foerst. “My research has focused on the question: Can robots be persons?”

Foerst hopes that readers of Génova's book will be “encouraged to think more profoundly about the relationship between us and the beings that share our life — especially the artificial ones.” She believes there is a need for theology that explains the realities that unfold in the boundary between faith and science.

When Génova began studying theology he had an engineering degree and was teaching electronics and electricity in a technical institute in Spain. As his theological studies progressed, he began connecting the fields of technology and theology. He was working on his master’s thesis about the relationship between theology and technology when he found references about Foerst and her theological approach to robotics and AI.

Later, when he was considering subjects for his doctoral thesis, he recalled Foerst’s work.

“Gradually I was forming the thought that … the fields of AI and robotics were a very important challenge to the future of humankind, and I was perceiving, too, the profound religious grounds that were present in all that… I could see the challenge to the idea of what means to be human,” Génova said.

He has since completed his doctorate at Facultat de Teologia de Catalunya (Catalunya Divinity School), and his thesis was published in July. Génova is now a Catholic priest in the Archdiocese of Zaragoza and chaplain of San Valero Foundation, a vocational institute and high school. In addition to his pastoral activities, he teaches electronics at San Valero Vocational Institute and religion at San Valero High School. He is also a professor of ecumenical theology at the Catholic Seminary of Zaragoza.

Thanks to Foerst, Génova said he “dared to introduce myself to the study of the challenges of AI and robotics so I could study their theological implications. Now I continue working on that, and I try to transmit the importance of all this for the future of humankind and religion, especially for the future of Christianity.”

“What I do appreciate about Francisco’s work is that he criticized me – in particular that my understanding of ‘personhood’ is too vague.’ There is nothing better than for a researcher to be challenged, that’s what we live for,” Foerst said.

https://twitter.com/AnneSBU

Anne’s Book Club on Facebook

Anne's Book Club on Pinterest

#Bonas Payne Talks About New Book, 'Crash!,' Importance of Thinking About History

A new book by St. Bonaventure University history professor Phillip Payne, Ph.D., frames the story of the 1929 stock market crash within the booming New Era economy of the 1920s and the bust of the Great Depression.

“Crash! How the Economic Boom and Bust of the 1920s Worked” was released by Johns Hopkins University Press in December.

The book by Payne, chair of the Department of History, discusses the topic of speculation in economics, specifically explaining the 1929 stock market crash.

Payne said the idea for the book originated when he was talking to an editor at an American History Association meeting about the launch of a new series called “How Things Worked.” The meeting was shortly after the stock market crash in 2008, and Payne said his students were shocked so he talked about it in his classes.

The book is intended for an undergraduate audience and aims to make complicated stories understandable, according to Payne.

“A lot of effort went into making this book accessible, a book you can pick up and read without a deep knowledge of economics or politics,” Payne said.

Kevin Sidoran, a senior biochemistry major, is in Payne’s “United States History since 1865” class this semester.

“Dr. Payne is a storyteller,” Sidoran said. “He is able to segue almost any discussion or side comment, however irrelevant, to what we are covering in lecture, and he always pulls in little tidbits of background info to make the larger ideas more tangible and coherent.”

Payne said he noticed many students are not interested in the topic of speculation in stock market crashes, but that it has real impact on their lives.

In the 19th century, bankers were just about the only ones following the stock market, according to Payne, but now the stock market is increasingly part of the economy.

Payne said he tells young people they need to think about history, especially in the turbulence of the modern economy, where people move from job to job.

A major takeaway from the book, according to Payne, is that to get to that level of speculation, to get to where the economy gets blown up, people have to forget it happened before and convince themselves the current time is different.

“In 1929, they convinced themselves the stock market was a money making machine and it was never going to crash,” Payne said. “In 2008 they convinced themselves of this again.”

Payne said we are still dealing with many of the issues discussed in his book in the current presidential election, such as fallout from the 2008 crash and transitions taking place in the economy with technology and globalization.

In addition to Payne’s interest in economic history, his areas of research include Warren G. Harding and exploring how popular culture is shaped by politics and vice versa. He is the author of “Dead Last: The Public Memory of Warren G. Harding’s Scandalous Legacy,” released by Ohio University Press in 2009.

Learn more about Payne and the history department via the blog bonashistorydept.blogspot.com.

https://twitter.com/AnneSBU

Anne’s Book Club on Facebook

Anne's Book Club on Pinterest

All Bonaventure Reads Selection ‘Just Mercy’ Explores Themes of Justice, Redemption

St. Bonaventure has chosen the nonfiction book “Just Mercy” by Bryan Stevenson as its common read for 2015-2016. This All Bonaventure Reads selection explores the inequity embedded in the U.S. criminal justice system.

“Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption” was released in October and focuses mainly on the work of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Ala., a legal practice Stevenson founded as a young lawyer that is dedicated to defending those most desperate and in need.

“Each year, All Bonaventure Reads committee members search for selections guided by descriptors such as ‘engaging,’ ‘contemporary,’ and ‘thought provoking.’ We nailed all three with ABR 2015’s ‘Just Mercy’ selection,” said Jean Trevarton Ehman, chair of the ABR Committee.

“We at St. Bonaventure University pride ourselves in fostering thinking forums in which each student’s opinion is valued; ‘Just Mercy’s’ emotional narrative is ripe with thought-provoking topics. This memoir probes historical and current biases and injustices that cross curricula, and we hope our ‘Just Mercy’ programming engages our freshmen in life-long soul searching based on Franciscan values,” Ehman said.

One of Stevenson’s first cases was that of Walter McMillian, a young man who was sentenced to die for a notorious murder he insisted he didn’t commit. It transformed the lawyer’s understanding of mercy and justice forever and illustrates numerous ongoing challenges in work advocating for social justice.

Chris Brown, director of the university’s First-Year Experience program, said “Just Mercy” is a timely selection for the campus at large, especially given the ongoing national conversation about race and criminal justice.

“Tensions involving race have been in the forefront of the national media, and the importance of racial justice extends into the day-to-day lives of our student body. We have taken steps in the Bonaventure community to address injustices, and we want to make sure our students are exposed to the need for continued action on the local and national level,” Brown said.

First-year students will receive copies of “Just Mercy” during orientation in July and are asked to read the book prior to the start of the fall semester. Students are engaged in conversations about the book’s themes in their University 101 course and various campuswide events during the upcoming academic year. In addition to the ABR committee and FYE office, numerous academic departments and the Student Affairs Division are already planning opportunities to unpack the themes of this book.

“I am excited to partner with my colleagues across campus to engage the entire Bonaventure community in the All Bonaventure Reads program. We look forward in the fall to announcing a series of events that will address the important topics of racism and equality in the criminal justice system and in society at large,” added Brown.

Stevenson has won relief for dozens of condemned prisoners, argued five times before the Supreme Court, and won national acclaim for his work challenging bias against the poor and people of color. He has received numerous awards, including the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant. In addition to serving as executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, he is a professor of law at New York University School of Law.

“Just Mercy” has won praise from notable authors including John Grisham and Tracy Kidder.

“Bryan Stevenson … is doing God’s work fighting for the poor, the oppressed, the voiceless, the vulnerable, the outcast, and those with no hope,” said Grisham.

Learn more about the book and the Equal Justice Initiative at bryanstevenson.com.

Campus programming will be announced at www.sbu.edu/ABR as events are confirmed.

https://twitter.com/AnneSBU

Anne’s Book Club on Facebook

Anne's Book Club on Pinterest

Author, Social Entrepreneur Adam Braun at Bona's

The St. Bonaventure University community will welcome social entrepreneur and author Adam Braun to campus Monday, Sept. 29. Braun’s memoir, “The Promise of a Pencil” is this year’s All Bonaventure Reads selection for new students.

Released in March, “The Promise of a Pencil: How an Ordinary Person Can Create Extraordinary Change,” chronicles Braun’s journey to find his calling. Each chapter describes “one clear step that every person can take to turn your biggest ambitions into reality.” For Braun, that meant taking a leap of faith to give up a job in high finance to found PencilsofPromise.org in 2008.

Braun’s approach that blends nonprofit idealism with for-profit business principles has led Pencils of Promise to successfully break ground on more than 200 schools in some of the poorest regions in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The organization has also expanded to offer scholarships for students to attend school, teacher training, and water and health programs to keep students healthy.

During his Sept. 29 campus visit, Braun will be welcomed into classrooms and small-group discussions throughout the day. He’ll talk about profit and passion with freshmen and faculty from the School of Business; writing and publishing with freshman journalism students; and global education with freshman education students and faculty.

Braun will address the Class of 2018 during a 7 p.m. program in the Reilly Center Arena. The talk is free and open to the public. Afterward, Braun will sign books in the University Bookstore.

“‘The Promise of a Pencil’ resonated with the Class of 2018 and St. Bonaventure community members, especially by Adam Braun’s literary technique of titling each chapter with a lesson he has learned,” said Jean Trevarton Ehman, director of the university’s Teaching and Learning Center and chair of the All Bonaventure Reads Committee. “We selected the title of ‘Promise’s’ epilogue as our Class of 2018 mantra: ‘Make Your Life a Story Worth Telling,’ as we thought it matched our Franciscan values plus would capture the enthusiasm of our college freshmen.”

First-year students were given copies of “The Promise of a Pencil” during summer orientation and asked to read the book prior to the start of the fall semester. Students are engaged in conversations about the book’s themes in their University 101 course and various campuswide events during the 2014-2015 academic year. University 101: Skills for the Good Journey is a one-credit course for all first-year students that helps them make the most of their freshman year. It combines specific academic topics, general study skills and content from the All Bonaventure Reads text.

Chris Brown, director of the university’s First-Year Experience program, has been struck by the way St. Bonaventure students have embraced the book’s theme to search for purpose in their lives.

“In my UNIV 101 class, many students are exploring their passion for their chosen fields and critically examining why they have decided to embark on their current journey,” Brown said. “They are embracing the importance of discovering purpose and passion while establishing the foundations for a truly happy life.”

In conjunction with the All Bonaventure Reads program, The Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts at the university is hosting an interactive “All Bona Reads” exhibition that addresses cross-cultural connections and how a freshman at SBU can get involved. In addition, as part of a Freshman Day of Service, incoming students brought in school supplies and assembled packs for refugee children being served by Saint’s Place in Rochester.

https://twitter.com/AnneSBU

Anne’s Book Club on Facebook

Anne's Book Club on Pinterest

Stephen Besecker on LiveLine

With all due respect to all of the other authors I have interviewed, this is my favorite interview with a fiction writer. You can listen to my chat with Steve Besecker by going to http://www.wesb.com/listen/, clicking on the "Local Programs" tab and scrolling to today's date (09-17-14)

In case you're curious: My favorite interview with a non-fiction writer was with Dan Barry. Do you see a theme?

https://twitter.com/AnneSBU

Anne’s Book Club on Facebook

Anne's Book Club on Pinterest

Bona Grad's Novel Optioned by Producer of 'Jack Ryan' Movies

This is an excerpt from an article in The Sun newspaper (from Orchard Park and East Aurora) about 1982 St. Bonaventure University graduate Steve Besecker and his series of novels:

Struggling socially, Besecker befriended a young Seneca Indian boy named John Wallace, who proudly displayed his heritage on a brown leather jacket. Besecker’s classmates took issue with John’s heritage, beat him into the ground and ripped apart his prized leather jacket.

The next day at school, John returned the favor in full, pummeling his bullies every bit as bad as they got him.

A year later both John and Besecker had moved out of East Aurora, the latter to Illinois for a brief period, but their friendship left a spark in the soon-to-be writer’s imagination.

In the decades that followed, Besecker graduated from St. Bonaventure (a marketing management major), moved to Orchard Park, started a family, found well-paying work and continued to write fiction here and there.

You can read the entire article here, and you can hear my interview with Steve on Wednesday's (9-17-14) LiveLine on 1490 WESB (and online at WESB.com.

https://twitter.com/AnneSBU

Anne’s Book Club on Facebook

Anne's Book Club on Pinterest

St. Bonaventure Professor Pens First Novel With Encouragement of Peer, Former Students

Dr. Denny Wilkins’ first novel is a love story in more ways than one.

Without the supportive embrace of a respected peer and two former students, “mapping Utah” still would be just a Word file on his computer, said Wilkins, now in his 18th year as a professor of journalism and mass communication at St. Bonaventure University.

Wilkins will talk about “mapping Utah” at the Olean Public Library at 7 p.m. Wednesday, April 9.

Longtime English professor Rick Simpson gushed about Wilkins’ manuscript when he read it several years ago, but it wasn’t until Kelly Zientek, ’05, prodded her former prof that he took the plunge to get the book published.

Wilkins had sent the manuscript to Zientek to read in 2011, but it wasn’t until early last semester — when asked by Wilkins to look at 70,000 words of another book he was working on — that the topic of his first book surfaced again.

“She sent me back her comments on the new book and said, ‘Whatever happened to ‘mapping Utah’?” Wilkins said. “A few days later, she called me and asked if she could try to publish it. She thought I might be angry, but I was never more honored and flattered in my life. This thing would still be sitting on my hard drive if Kelly hadn’t pushed it.”

Zientek had no experience in the publishing world, but was so impressed with “mapping Utah” that she was willing to figure it out in order to get Wilkins’ work in people’s hands.

“I just felt like he was this really accomplished person and feared that I might be overstepping my bounds, but he was really receptive to the idea,” said Zientek, an adjunct ESL instructor at UNC-Charlotte. “I just started Googling, and actually found some e-books on publishing e-books to help me figure this out.”

Zientek enlisted friend and former college roommate Holly McIntyre Hartigan, ’05, to design the book’s cover. The gesture was especially meaningful to Wilkins; Holly was dating senior Shane Colligan in the spring of 2003 when Colligan died, nine years to the day after receiving his first of two heart transplants.

“Holly and Shane’s roommates came to me the Monday after he died,” recalled Wilkins, a respected teacher but notoriously tough grader. “Shane had left an email posted on his dorm room door with a compliment from me of maybe six words and he had written on it in big red letters, ‘Yowza!’ They just thought Shane would have liked me to have it, so having Holly involved in my book is very special.”

Zientek formatted Wilkins’ novel to be published as an e-book for Kindle, Nook and Smashwords, and as a print-on-demand paperback she created through Createspace.com; it’s available with the e-books at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com.

“What e-publishing and print-on-demand has done is give authors a lot more power over their work,” she said. “And in the past, where you might get only a few weeks on a store shelf to turn a profit before it gets pulled, being available as an e-book gives a book a chance to grow organically and slowly as people discover it.”

Wilkins meticulously details the fitful journey to publication at mappingutah.com, but in a nutshell:

In 1989, the love of Wilkins’ life rejected his matrimonial request, he emptied two six-packs, wrote 30 pages he only vaguely recalls writing, threw the floppy disk in a box, found it five years later, decided adding to the story was better than working on his doctoral dissertation, forgot about it again, discovered it four years later, fleshed out the characters some more, sent sample chapters to 70 literary agents, got feedback from one who said it was wordy, whacked 48,000 words (one at a time), and then let it “gather digital dust” for another six years.

Enter Dr. Simpson. Over breakfast while discussing another friend’s attempt at a novel, Wilkins cracked to Simpson, “I’m sure glad I didn’t let you read mine.”

Unaware Wilkins had written a book, Simpson pestered him for months until Wilkins finally let him read it. A month later, Simpson emailed him:

“The characters are marvelous. You attempt one of the most difficult feats of all for the male novelist, screenwriter, dramatist, or poet, namely the portrayal from the inside of a complex, flawed, mature, maturing woman. … The portrayals of both (main characters) are striking and memorable. And many fine minor characters show up. … I found myself caring about these people quickly and deeply. I turned pages rapidly. I thought about the story when I wasn’t reading. I wanted to get back to the book when I was elsewhere.”

Flattered to the brink of tears, Wilkins still left the manuscript in dry dock for five more years until he let Zientek read it. She did more than get it published.

“Kelly is really the person who made it better,” Wilkins said. “She did a conceptual edit, and then a line edit. She found things as a woman that as a guy I didn’t see. And she was incredibly professional about it. She didn’t make changes, she just pointed out the problems and let me make the decisions.”

The editing process was payback for a professor’s passionate devotion to detail, Zientek said.

“Denny drilled a couple of things into our heads as J-students: don’t be redundant; and show, don’t tell,” she said. “So I had to laugh out loud a few times when I would make comments on the manuscript to ask him to show, not just tell.”

Subtitled “love and war in the wilderness,” Wilkins’ “mapping Utah” is about a 30-year-old woman named Kara who flees a stifling job and relationship in Seattle and follows the prompting of a mysterious map into the majesty of Utah.

There, she encounters Noah, a licensed pilot who adores his hermitic existence in Greasewood Draw, where he battles the destruction of delicate wildlife areas by dropping paint bombs from an ultralight plane onto off-road vehicles.

https://twitter.com/AnneSBU

Anne’s Book Club on Facebook