Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey: Amazon.ca: Isabel Fonseca: Books

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They travel endlessly and seem to appear almost everywhere, yet they are the world's most mysterious people: Gypsies. Isabel Fonseca has done the impossible, entering into their world, living and traveling with Gypsies during several long trips to Eastern Europe, and she has brought back an insightful, highly personal, and very readable account of who the Gypsies are and how they live. The Gypsies have a legendary aversion to "gadje," or outsiders, but Fonseca has lifted the curtain and written gracefully about their lives on the edge of society. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

An exploration of the frequently persecuted and misunderstood Gypsy population of eastern Europe.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Inside This Book (Learn More)

First Sentence
USUALLY ON MY journeys in Eastern Europe I traveled alone and made friends along the way. Read the first page

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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index

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Customer Reviews

42 Reviews

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(2)
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Average Customer Review

3.8 out of 5 stars (42 customer reviews)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars A strong effort..., Dec 2 2000

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"kjb730" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey (Paperback)

...to give some definition to a mysterious ethnic group. Fonseca offers rich details of Gypsy life, culled from numerous visits with European Roma in the early 1990s. Her writing sometimes gets a little thick and scholarly, but it's worth muddling through, especially if this is a particular area of interest.

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2.0 out of 5 stars written by a wealthy snob, Mar 7 2011

By

Sam Reeve (BC, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey (Paperback)

Fonseca can sure write, but she should really stick to fiction, since most of this is just that. She puts in generalizations about gyspsies, not once thinking to maybe cite her sources. This book is pretty much just her opinion, and she's also very rude.

The people she talks about took her into their homes, fed her, and let her observe them to write this book which would in turn make her money. Then when she writes it she decides to call some of her subjects ugly, and to say she was bored by some of the things they told her and showed her. Wow. Such a nice guest.

It's clear she's just some rich American who wanted nothing more than an exotic adventure and some exotic book under her belt.

This book also further exoticizes the Rom, which really doesn't help their cause.

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5.0 out of 5 stars The ambiguities of cultural identity, Mar 10 2010

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Kenton L. Eidse "keidse" (Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

This review is from: Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey (Paperback)

Are dying cultures an irrepressible phenomenon we should learn to accept, however grudgingly, or are we obligated to fight tooth and nail to revive and restore fading traditions, languages, rites and lore? What if this "dying out" is encouraged by the dominating and ethnocentric majorities who "host" such disappearing cultures? Where are the borders distinguishing multiculturalism from assimilation, or isolation from community?

Such prescient questions are threaded through Isabella Fonseca's fascinating journalistic exploration of Gypsy (or Roma) culture in Europe. Fonseca spent four years among various Gypsy neighbourhoods, villages and traveling caravans from Albania and Romania to Germany and France. Her graceful and spare prose flows without sentimentality between vivid detail of family life in the city slums, heartfelt insight into the beauty and dark realities of the culture, and devastating social analysis.

This is a wonderful read -- a thorough, realist, engaging insight into a very misunderstood people.

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Most recent customer reviews

1.0 out of 5 stars Sladerous book
Reading this book I had a sensation that can be well described by the words of the author when she stumbled on a pair of bare-assed middle-aged man in Warsaw. Read more

Published on July 5 2004

5.0 out of 5 stars Living with the Gypsies
Isabel Fonseca holds no punches when she writes about the gypsies. The author tells it like it is and makes no excuses for the lifestyle the gypsies choose to live with. Read more

Published on April 27 2004 by William D. Tompkins