Elevate Difference

Reviews by Kittye Delle Robbins-Herring

Kittye Delle Robbins-Herring

Kittye Delle Robbins-Herring, poet, teacher, gardener, traveler, professor emerita in French language and literature at Mississippi State University, loves to study at home and abroad. She has visited France, Japan, Turkey and several other countries. She would like to visit China in the next year or two. Her publications include articles on the women troubadours and Christine de Pizan, as well as translations of French poetry. Her own poetry has appeared in Mobius and Jabberwock. Current interests include women's spirituality, French folklore, and gender issues in society. She sees writing book reviews as a significant way to contribute to ongoing conversations among feminists. She enjoys cats, flowers, good food, music, visiting art museums and historical sites with her husband Stuart, her son Davis, and her daughter-in-law Angela.

Lily of the Nile: A Novel of Cleopatra's Daughter

Lily of the Nile is a treat for lovers of colorful historical fiction. An intriguing reconstruction of the ancient cult of the goddess Isis, the book is set in the last years of the first century B.C. in Alexandria and imperial Rome. The novel is told from the viewpoint of Cleopatra Selene, one of the children of Mark Antony and the most famous Cleopatra of all, the celebrated Queen of Egypt. Princess Selene is only ten years old when her parents commit suicide rather than fall into the hands of a victorious Octavian. Taken captive by the Romans, Selene must use all her intelligence and diplomatic skills to survive.

The Monster Within: The Hidden Side of Motherhood

Psychiatrist, mother, and grandmother Barbara Almond's provocative new study makes a valuable contribution to the ongoing debate about what she terms “the dark side of motherhood.” The negative feelings a mother inevitably has toward her child, however loving she may be, and the painful conflicts these feelings can engender, is a topic still too often taboo in American culture.

Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism Between Women in Caribbean Literature

Tinsley’s fascinating study of “women loving women” examines their colonial and postcolonial experiences in Dutch, French, and English-speaking areas of the Caribbean. This volume, in the Perverse Modernities series by Duke University Press, takes its title from the writing of Trinidad-born poet-novelist Dionne Brand, whose cane-cutter character Elizete uses the phrase “thiefing sugar” to describe her feelings for another woman, Verlia.

Maid as Muse: How Servants Changed Emily Dickinson's Life and Language

The popular image of Emily Dickinson is that of an almost ghostly woman in white, secluding herself in an upstairs bedroom alone, but Maid as Muse's innovative approach shows her frequently in the kitchen. There, she is found stirring puddings, baking her famous gingerbread, and living on familiar terms with the household help.

I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem

This fascinating novel, which won France's Grand Prix Littéraire de la Femme, offers readers a vivid re-imagining of the life of a historical figure mentioned only briefly in the transcripts of the seventeenth-century Salem witch trials: a slave woman of Caribbean origins, accused of practicing voodoo.

Everyday Nationalism: Women of the Hindu Right in India

Everyday Nationalism, a publication in "The Ethnography of Political Violence" series, offers readers a provocative and sometimes disturbing look at Hindu nationalist organizations and the role of Indian women in representing the nationalist movement.

India Exposed: The Subcontinent A-Z

The dust jacket of the enigmatic picture book India Exposed displays row upon row of bright blue Kali figures prepared for a festival. Nude goddesses sticking out their intense pink tongues, each statue garlanded with human heads (all male, as far as I can tell), dwarf the lone craftsman at work among them.

The Hindus: An Alternative History

Wendy Doniger, currently the most outstanding American scholar of Hinduism, serves us a feast of tasty historical events and interpretative myths in this rich curry of a book, covering social and cultural developments in the Indian subcontinent from prehistoric times to the modern day.

Findings: Essays on the Natural and Unnatural World

Jamie writes with sobriety, sensitivity and grace about the natural world and our human place within it. Her book is sparsely illustrated with delicate black-and-white photographs that picture many of her topics.

Captain of the Sleepers

Captain of the Sleepers is a tropical story of secrets and conflicts: familial, sexual, social, political, all intricately tangled up together in the Caribbean islands. It proceeds along parallel timelines, unfolding in the present day and in the 1940s and '50s, switching narrators at times, evoking disturbing events in which North American expatriates, tourists and Marines play key roles.

Elusive Equality: Gender, Citizenship, and the Limits of Democracy in Czechoslovakia, 1918-1950

Melissa Feinberg’s must-read new book, Elusive Equality, chronicles in rich and sometimes dramatic detail the fascinating, though frequently distressing, events that marked Czech feminists’ struggle to implement the radical ideas of equality on which the Czechoslovak Republic was founded after the end of World War I.

Glory in a Line: A Life of Foujita

Readers interested in art, Paris, Tokyo, or multiculturalism in the first half of the twentieth century will enjoy Phyllis Birnbaum’s carefully documented biography of Foujita’s tumultuous life as an aristocratic playboy and fiercely dedicated artist, both acclaimed and vilified for his controversial works.
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