Rating: 
Summary: Excellent historical journalism
Review: An exciting and fascinating read, poignant at times and frustrating at others. Like the culture and peoples she describes, Ms. Fonseca doesn't merely delineate facts and figures, but elucidates a story marked by her own experience among the Roma. That story is helped along by her style of writing--just as she really warms each new subject and really begins to capture the reader, she suddenly diverts, and expounds upon historical documents, testimonies, philosophical writings, the people that she's met and their ideas, their cultural milieu. She meanders like the Gypsy stereotypes that she struggles to dissolve, but which keep popping up in the propaganda of repressive governments, in the fantasies of Western romantic fiction, and in some of the very people that she meets. Like with any good storyteller, however, these wandering and seemingly disparate threads always weave back together, in the end, to the initial subject matter. Enlightened by the tangents. Enlightened perhaps by the spirit of wandering.
It was reminiscent of a segment of the film, _The Saragosa Manuscript_, where an old Gypsy tells a story. Every time that his listeners begin to lose themselves in the telling, he interrupts himself to refill his glass, or a helper happens to choose that moment to pull him aside for a brief caucus.
Like any good journalist, Fonseca also deliberately cites her references, from Eastern European thinkers to Romany activists to historical legislation. She juggles the quantitative information with the humane element, successfully in my opinion. She poses questions not through rhetoric, but through the juxtaposition of experience and documentation of the Gypsy human condition. Also the mark of what I think of as good journalism, she doesn't answer those questions with mere rhetoric, but through her writing attempts to examine multiple facets of each problem. In the end, most of the major questions regarding the future are left up to the reader to decide themselves, guided by a better understanding of the cultural issues.
That said, this probably isn't the book for you if you're looking for an encyclopaedic tome on Gypsy folklore and cultural specifics, and all the various theories thereof in all their lurid details. It's encyclopaedic in scope, but manages to be so in such limited space by focusing mostly on the personal experiences of Fonseca in Eastern Europe and the general histories of migration and settlement in various locals.
I personally think it was fantastic as an introduction to the subject, granting a decent overview of Gypsy history and a feeling for the culture while being a captivating read. Often sad or frustrating because of the history described, it still left me with a feeling of hope.
Rating: 
Summary: A survey of topics
Review: Fonseca has written a book that by turns fascinates and irritates. It fascinates because it takes a hard look at a history that has been so purposefully unwritten. It irritates because it jumps from subject to subject in a way that often feels incoherent and incomplete and fails to give an orderly and concrete view of the Roma.
My feeling is that the book is marketed incorrectly as being about the Gypsies and their journey. I think that most correctly it is about Fonseca and her experience of learning about the Rom. I picked up this book looking for a better historical and cultural understanding of who they are, and this book provides this information in only an incomplete way.
The subjects in the book range from the social conditions of Rom in various eastern European countries, to some discussion of historical origins, to the Gypsy experience of the Holocaust. Through all these chapters, the organising force of the book is not historical or even political but is rather the thesis that Fonseca is building regarding the place (or lack of place) that the Rom have experienced both currently and historically.
There is a lot to learn here, and I suspect that I would have been less frustrated had I first read a decent straighforward historical book. It was only as an introduction to the subject that I found Bury Me Standing confusing and lacking.
I liked the use of the first person and the way that Fonseca makes clear the prejudices and issues which she brought to the study. After living in Europe for eight years, I gave Fonseca big points for saying things out loud about the question of asylum seekers and Eastern European immigration that very few in the EU are prepared to admit. There is material here that I am going to be thinking about for a long time to come.
In short: this is not the one-book overview which is going to answer your questions about the Rom, but it is a decently written and fascinating book in its own right. I would have preferred to see more annotation, but the bibliography is extensive and organized by subject, which is helpful for choosing further reading.
Three-and-a-half stars, really, with a half star round up for the interesting subject matter.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful book!
Review: This book is one of the best modern overviews of gypsies today, dealing with trials and troubles. The author deals with the situation of the Roma in post-Communist Eastern Europe with a slightly biased eye, but if you take some things with a grain of salt, this book is a wonderful read and you might learn something too!
Rating:
Summary: An uncommon view into a secret people
Review: Isabel Fonseca does not write as an anthropologist; she has opinions, and is sometimes quite forthright about her negative feeling. She has documented her travels in Bulgaria and Albania, where she visits various Gypsy families in their shantytowns. The impoverishment of Albania is accentuated for the Gypsies, who traditionally shun education and a trade in favor of a nomadic existence. These semi-permanent Gypsies never merge with the people around them, instead staying separate and still abiding by cleanliness laws special to Rom culture. Even the more well-off Rom families live their own special way and stay remote from the world around them.Despite her lack of "objectivity" or perhaps because of it, Fonseca writes a compelling book about the daily live and struggles of Rom in various Eastern European countries. It can perhaps be compared to Oscar Lewis' Five Families, a well-known anthropological look at family life across economic levels in Mexico.
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