Bury Me Standing

A masterful work of personal reportage, this volume is also a vibrant portrait of a mysterious people and an essential document of a disappearing culture. Fabled, feared, romanticized, and reviled, the Gypsies—or Roma—are among the least understood people on earth. Their culture remains largely obscure, but in Isabel Fonseca they have found an eloquent witness. In Bury Me Standing, alongside unforgettable portraits of individuals—the poet, the politician, the child prostitute—Fonseca offers sharp insights into the humor, language, wisdom, and taboos of the Roma. She traces their exodus out of India 1,000 years ago and their astonishing history of persecution: enslaved by the princes of medieval Romania; massacred by the Nazis; forcibly assimilated by the communist regimes; evicted from their settlements in Eastern Europe, and most recently, in Western Europe as well. Whether as handy scapegoats or figments of the romantic imagination, the Gypsies have always been with us—but never before have they been brought so vividly to life. Includes fifty black and white photos.

Discusses the historical origins, beliefs, arts, family life, cultural clashes with white Europeans, and future hopes of the nomadic Rom, or Roma, people who were once called Gypsies.

After more than twenty years of life in London, Jean and Mark Hubbard decamp to a remote tropical island in the Indian Ocean. But when Jean, a health columnist, discovers a salacious love letter addressed to her husband, she realizes that she has misdiagnosed some acute pathologies in her own life. The long idyll of their mutual ease is over - and a new quest has just begun. Looking for answers, Jean goes undercover with a surreptitious correspondence that propels her on to alarming and illuminating adventures of her own. Isabel Fonseca explores the impulses that color and disrupt our lives even as they reveal, ever more clearly, the nature of love.