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Best-selling novelist Colum McCann, whose gritty 9/11 book Let the Great World Spin has achieved worldwide acclaim, will be the keynote speaker at the University’s eighth annual First Year Academic Convocation on Sept. 15.
McCann’s address to the University’s recently arrived freshmen and new transfer students will be held at 7 p.m. in Conte Forum. The address will follow the “First Flight” procession across campus, a beloved tradition that begins at Linden Lane where members of the Boston College Jesuit Community offer a blessing and challenge BC’s newest students to answer the call of Society of Jesus founder St. Ignatius of Loyola and “set the world aflame.”
Also invited as honored guests will be members of the Boston College Golden Anniversary class of 1962, who will join in the festivities.
“We want to incorporate the students into the Boston College community — not only as students, but along with faculty and administrators, to welcome them into the larger alumni community,” said Rev. Joseph Marchese, director of the First Year Experience program.
Fr. Marchese said the initiation rite is more than a welcome. The selection of a common text brings the entire class together in an academic exercise and establishes an academic theme for the year.
Let the Great World Spin has been hailed by critics around the world and earned the 2009 National Book Award in the US, the 2010 Best Foreign Novel Award in China and the 2011 literary award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A best seller on four continents, the novel builds a narrative around Philippee Petit, a French acrobat who walked across a tightrope between the World Trade towers in 1974. The event serves as the backdrop to introduce other characters – an immigrant Irish priest and his brother, an aging prostitute, a Guatemalan nurse, a mother who lost her son in Vietnam, a judge and an artist – each who become connected in some way throughout the story.
The book was selected for the new BC students due to the interconnectedness of the characters and the theme of “transcendence in everyday life,” said Fr. Marchese.
“Let the Great World Spin was a National Book Award winner. It gives us a way of thinking about the tragedy of 9/11 and how it has affected so many people. It explores issues of war and peace, the need for both social justice and our ministry to a broken world. Beyond all, it explores the idea that we are called by God, beyond the vision of self service, to embrace our responsibility to leadership in a larger community.”
A native of Dublin, McCann began his career as a journalist at The Irish Press. In the early 1980s he took a bicycle trip across North America and then worked as a wilderness guide in a program for juvenile delinquents in Texas. He traveled to Japan and eventually settled in New York City, where he currently lives with his family while teaching creative writing at Hunter College.
He has published several books, including Songdogs, This Side of Brightness, Dancer and Zoli, and he has written for The New York Times, Atlantic Monthly and GQ, among other notable publications.
McCann will join a long line of prominent past speakers to the First Year Convocation program, including President Barack Obama — then a US senator — 2008 presidential candidate US Sen. John McCain, and writers J. R. Moehringer and Tracy Kidder.