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Getting critical--When not fulfilling her duties as president, Joanne Creighton is apparently doing a lot of reading. Her review of two new novels by prolific authors Margaret Drabble and Joyce Carol Oates was the featured review in the book section of the Sunday (September 14) Chicago Tribune. According to Creighton, the difference in the two novelists reflects "the radically different textures of British and American life and ... the different novelistic traditions that undergird their work." In Drabble's The Witch of Exmoor a successful, professional British family faces the challenges of dealing with their eccentric and misanthropic mother; in Oates's Man Crazy, a woman in a psychiatric detention center recounts her life experiences, including time in a satanic cult. Both, our reviewer notes, are worth reading.

Zeroing in on Zola--French professor Catherine LeGouis, writing in the summer issue of The American Scholar, has reviewed a new edition of the writings of Emile Zola regarding the Dreyfus Affair. According to LeGouis, The Dreyfus Affair: "J'Accuse" and Other Writings, edited by Alaine Pagès and translated by Eleanor Levieux, "constitutes one of the clearest and most engrossing expositions of this complex case." Zola, preeminent novelist and man of letters, was a central figure in defending Alfred Dreyfus, a military officer wrongly accused of treason, in this issue that rocked French society one hundred years ago. Dreyfus became a symbol of injustice for liberal intellectuals who opposed such right-wing reactionary forces as the military and the church. However, Zola's defense of Dreyfus was partially motivated by self-interest, LeGouis notes.

Pork-free--The newest cultural signal on New York City's multicultural dial is Chinese restaurants run by Chinese Muslims. And who better to talk about Chinese Muslims than Jonathan Lipman, history professor and author of Familiar Strangers, a history of Muslims in northwest China? Lipman's expertise is central to the article "Where's the Pork? Not Here" in the Sunday (September 7) New York Times.

Keeping the College afloat--MHC was once known on the high seas as well as in the groves of academe, according to an article in the Daily Hampshire Gazette. During World War II, the USS Lyon (an attack transport ship), and the cargo ships SS Mary Lyon and SS Mount Holyoke Victory helped America's cause. MHC alumnae attended the Victory's launching, and the MHC community raised $350 to buy books for the ship's library. The Victory, a 455-foot, 10,800-ton vessel, later weathered a typhoon while near the Mariana Islands by dragging anchor and drifting for five hours, barely missing several other ships carrying high explosives. The Lyon's crew saw combat in Italy, France, Okinawa, and Morocco. Amphibious vessels like the Lyon were named after famous women, and the Mary Lyon and SS Mount Holyoke Victory were part of series of ships named after American educators and after the country's oldest educational institutions.