There’s always been a mystique surrounding Gypsies, this book takes a good stab at separating truth from fiction. Trust me; the real story is every bit as fascinating as the folklore. This is a great introduction to their culture & history; educational, shocking, often heartbreaking and highly readable.
By living amongst them, Isabel Fonseca was able to do what few outsiders have accomplished, provide a glimpse into the way of life of a highly secretive people. Observations on their supersti More...

Finding my way to this after finishing Colum McCann's excellent new novel, ZOLI, I learned a great deal about Gypsy culture and the roots of ethnic persecution in Eastern Europe. Fonseca has a supple and engaging voice. She tells a personal story, remaining stoic despite the outrageously alien landscape she finds herself trying to navigate. More importantly, she has the anthropological and sociological chops to explore the issue on a more theoretical and intellectual level than your everyday jou More...

Before I read Bury Me Standing, I was devoted solely to fiction. My experience with non-fiction was limited to very dry histories that communicated NO sense of the people or circumstances involved. I don't know why I bought Bury Me Standing at the book shop of the Holocaust Museum in D.C., but I did, and it changed me in several regards.

First, I gained a much broader understanding of what the Holocaust meant and means. The Roma/Gypsy population was, percentage-wise, as or more significantly dec More...

This book was a great example of book design/ marketing at work. I came upon it wandering through Barnes and Noble (I think), and the cover just jumped out at me. Combined with a very catchy title, it was pretty hard to resist. It helped that I knew absolutely nothing about the subject matter, so there was some added interest there.

Bury Me Standing is a combination of an anthropological study and a history, weighted more heavily towards the former. The bulk of the text is a chronicle of Fonseca’ More...

Well, it took me awhile, but I finally finished this book. Each chapter could stand on its own which is why I kept jumping in and out of this book over the past months. It was pretty good. Some of the writing annoyed me at the beginning, but I can't remember specifically why since I read those chapters so long ago. I didn't expect the book to be focused so much on the author and her specific experiences with gypsies - I expected (and wanted) more about the history and current state of gypsies in More...

really interesting book. you learn as much about the author as the subjects, which becomes more obvious in an ethnography about a marginalized group.

i picked up this book as a development economist, but the questions about the meanings of "identity," "history," "other" and "progress" are important in much more varied settings. persecution is traced through what can be discovered of a long past, but is most vivid in the descriptions of nazi and communist methods of dealing with the "gypsy plague More...

This was one successful random pickup at the library. I saw the cover and thought "I don't really know anything about gypsies" so I looked at the back and it had praise from Said, so I thought what the hell.

The author has this really interesting combination between personal narrative, somewhat like travel writing and an anthropological approach.

Most interesting to me was her analasis of Romani group memory, or lack there of, that she attributes to a survival seize the day mentality. Although t More...

Although I learned a lot about gypsies (since I knew next to nothing) this book left a great deal to be desired. My book group wasn't happy that I chose this book for last month's book group discussion - we felt this author had an amazing topic to bring to an interested audience but just didn't deliver. We were impressed with her travels and that she lived with a gyspy family but her writing seemed torpid to us. I know several of my friends outside of my book group loved this book so it came wit More...

The Rom are in the news again and that is never good for them. (I cannot bring myself to use the word Gypsy, although Fonseca does). The latest European country to find them enough of a nuisance for deportation is France. The title of Fonseca's book comes from a Rom proverb: "Bury me standing because I have lived on my knees." Yet Fonseca's Rom are anything but kneeling. Although the caravans appear to be gone, victims of industrialization and modernization, much of it compulsory, most maintain More...

My personal philosophy of late has been: Ignorance leads to Fear, which leads to Hate that often ends in violence and/or injustice. This philosophy is the drive behind my desire for cultural knowledge of all types.

Often when I read about Gypsies or hear about them it is in a negative context. Therefore, I got this book to learn more about their culture. Wow! It really was an eye opener! I read this book many years ago. However, I thought it important to post about this book considering what is g More...

What a brilliant, engaging story about a little-known and, frankly, mostly persecuted group of people who seem to exist in people's minds solely in terms of their folkloric culture and penchant for thievery. Fonseca really gets underneath the protective covering insulating this incredibly reclusive and insular culture, who have remained virtually invisible, despite the formidable numbers of Gypsies existing within Europe. Tracing Gypsy culture to its origins in India, Fonseca details the innumer More...

At some point in life, you stop being surprised. I mean, you still occasionally act surprised -- but it's mostly just for fun, because you've heard it all before. And then you're sitting around sipping wine out on the deck, and you get the surprise of the century: your cool, liberal, multicultural friend passionately declares that "gypsy culture has no merit whatsoever, and if it got wiped off the face of the earth tomorrow it would be no loss to humanity." I almost passed out. And so an otherwi More...

This book is about the Rom (Gypsies) and includes research, personal interviews and observations of the author that were made over a period of ~1990 - 1995 when she travel extensively in eastern Europe. It includes references and suggestions for further reading as well as several photographs of some of the people that she interviewed.

The author makes that point in the book that the Rom are a particularly disadvantaged group of people in part because of various social characteristics. The childre More...

I came to my interest in the lives of the Gypsies initially through their music. As I lived in Turkey and Poland for much of the 90s, and travelled in the Balkans, I was very aware of them as a presence, and aware too of the hatred they attract. Isabel Fonseca naturally spends a lot of her book on the nature and origins of this vilification.

She shows the Gypsies, as you might expect, in the light in which they often present themselves - being free-spirited, outside the rules of a society they d More...

Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey ought to be required reading for anyone who believes they know a thing or two about European history. As it turns out (speaking from personal experience), one might even possess an advanced degree in the subject and still need educating about the history of this intriguing European population. And this, to a large degree, is Isabel Fonseca's point - the Roma (or Gypsies), historically-speaking represent a practically invisible group of people, even More...

In this, an account in person and history, at once simultaneous and ambivalent, Fonseca presents the paradox of Gypsies.

My personal reaction through the progression of the book has been polite interest, vague indignation, horror, and pitying despair, and finally slightly-more-informed-than-before indifference. The polite interest was piqued by charming and disarming descriptions of familial ties. The middle negative feelings akin to pity brought on by the presentation of Gypsies' long, largely More...

A hard read for me but one loaded with historical facts and Information about a nation of people I knew very little. I had always heard of the gypsies and even been warned as a child to not talk to them because they were "just traveling through and couldn't be trusted". They were "just traveling through" in reality because no nation would claim them or really allow them to establish permanent homes and dwelling sites. The author, Isabel Fonseca did an amazing job of researching, observing, and r More...

i had run into gypsies for the first time when i was 21 and in Italy. People had just told me they were "beggars" and "street people." When i saw this book in a bookstore I was curious and read it. It was fascinating and very thought provoking. Intimate stories of individual people and their families as well as an intensive history of the "Roma" culture.

This book is a remarkable personal account of life with the Gypsies of Eastern and Central Europe. The personal story is interspersed with astonishing historical accounts of the history of the Gypsies, a history that was never written down making this book even more important. Their story is one of perpetual persecution and a code of honour that has sustained them. I learned that the Romany language can be spoken and understood in Modern India! Proving it's Sanskrit roots and surely proving once More...

Even after finishing this book, I’m not entirely sure why it is titled Bury Me Standing. I don’t recall a mention of this phrase in the book, nor about funerals. Maybe it was something I skipped over or misread? (If you know what the title refers to, please let me know.)

Isabel Fonseca (otherwise known as Martin Amis’ wife) opens this journey into the lives of Gypsies with the story of Papusza, who was the most famous Romany poet, but whose death in 1987 went unnoticed. Already this beginning pre More...

I've seen many shows over the past year or so on the gypsies, and I've always had a curiosity about the gypsies in my town. While I was aware of the gypsies' persecution during World War II, I wasn't aware of the extent of the history of persecution, which this book shared, along with spotlighting individual gypsies and their communities. I am beginning to understand more about why they choose to be secretive and the misunderstandings associated with such secrecy. One thing that I was disappoint More...

Academic. Boring. Full of characters, yet having no character. My main fault with this book is that it was written by the author. Really really overwritten. That, and it appears to now be the most available general interest book on gypsies out there, which is regrettable.

An excellent and evocative account of a people that have suffered more marginalisation and abuse than any other.

I was horrified to read, for example, that despite losing at least a quarter of their population in the holocaust they were not even represented at the National Holocaust Memorial until 1986 when Elie Wiesel resigned as President of the council. Up until then Wiesel had actively blocked any acknowledgement of the horrors suffered by Gypsies - whose systematic annihilation started in 1 More...

This book is about the Gypsies of Eastern Europe and their situation in the modern world. Well, "modern" being the early to mid-nineties.

Gypsies were more of a Halloween costume than a real culture or group of people as far as I was concerned before I moved to Europe. Upon moving to Europe, I discovered very early -- immediately, in fact -- that Gypsies are indeed real and almost universally loathed. Even the most open-minded people I knew had nothing but horrible things to say about the Gypsie More...

If you thought you knew enough about the Holocaust but you haven't read this book, you probably don't know enough about the Holocaust. If you thought democracy in the former Soviet Union could only mean a better life,that ghettos were gone, you need to read this book. Solid research entwines with the author's personal experiences among contemporary Gypsies in Europe for a fascinating, sobering, intriguing page-turner.

Fonseca's insights provoke the reader toward a deeper understanding of what it More...

I just bought this book at a used bookstore- after reading it a long time ago. It's really neat- especially if you're an eastern european mutt ;)

The author decides to live with Roma across Eastern Europe in order to research this book–from Albania to Bulgaria to Poland and Romania and a number of countries in between. She identifies the kinds of problems that Roma minorities in Europe face from poverty, language to discrimination. It seems like a pretty honest straightforward look at life for this minority. At times though the structure of the book lacks purpose and direction. Each chapter is a country and Fonseca basically tells some ve More...

This book was AMAZING! Far and away the best academic book I've read about Gypsies so far. Fonseca takes us inside the home of Romani, into their past and into the future. Far from Romanticizing these people, she gives us the truth with all it's harsh beauty. Centered mostly around the Eastern European bloc, outsiders are given a rare glimpse into what it means to be Rom. I would love it if Fonseca followed up this book with a look into other Romani people around the world i.e. Spain, Russia, So More...

A clear concise perspective on an otherwise unknowable people. The gypsies are demystified without losing any of their mythology.

I read this years ago and although I retained very little of the content, I held onto the desire to read it again someday. Well, someday came around and I gave up halfway through. The treatment of the Roma in Europe and the prejudices against them remind me in many ways of First Nations people in Canada, but after picking up Mortality by Christopher Hitchens at the halfway mark, I realized, 'THIS is what writing should be like and life is too short to force yourself to finish books that don't gr More...