May
9, 2003
Front-Page
News
Making Waves
Christopher Benfey’s The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits,
Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan is “a
fine new book,” writes Ian Buruma in the May 15 edition
of the New York Review of Books. Buruma traces Benfey’s
story of Gilded Age “artists, intellectuals, and aesthetes,
many of them from Boston, who hankered after a more refined or
spiritual way of life” than the hunger for riches and power
that seized post-Civil War America. All “found themselves
infected by a strong dose of Japanophilia,” he writes, drawn
to its “Zen austerity and reserve.” Some of their
visits to Japan were “little more than glorified shopping
sprees;” still, the items they brought back resulted in
“some of the best Asian art collections in the world.”
Buruma concludes, “In the end, of course, it does not matter
much why people are attracted to this or that place. . . . The
important thing is what they do and leave behind. Benfey gives
a fascinating account of the creative sparks that flew between
Americans and Japanese in the Gilded Age and after.” Publisher’s
Weekly gave The Great Wave a starred review in its
April 7 issue. “The quests for spiritual fulfillment of
the figures profiled here unfold in extraordinary ways,”
the magazine writes. “Cultural historian Benfey, a professor
of English at Mount Holyoke. . . . seamlessly braids the far-flung
adventures of cultural importers/
exporters from both countries and offers an enjoyable collection
of eclectic and surprising historical narratives about such figures
as Isabella Stewart Gardner and Henry Adams. . . . The cultural
exchanges that Benfey describes, at times comic, are tantalizing
examples of how nations develop and in what ways they are able
to learn from each other.”
|
WAVES
in Havelocks (circa 1942), by Dorothy M. Cogswell,
former chair of Mount Holyoke’s art department, offers
a glimpse of what life was
like for women Marines who trained on Mount Holyoke’s
campus. |
Making WAVES
MHC’s role in preparing women for military service
during World War II is mentioned in an article in the April 13
San Francisco Chronicle profiling four women who served
in the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve. Chronicle writers
Carolyne Zinko and Pati Poblete note that training of women Marines
was initially conducted at MHC and at Hunter College, until crowding
forced the Marine Corps to open Camp Lejeune in North Carolina
to women. “The women went to boot camp—for some their
first major trip away from home—and then were sent to various
bases to serve as telephone operators, postal workers, office
staff, chauffeurs, truck drivers, aviation mechanics and the like.
By June 1944, 18,000 women had enrolled in the Marine Reserve,”
the story notes.
The
counter is
1,818
|
