More travel stories

'Bury Me Standing': The Gypsies and Their Journey' by Isabel Fonseca. Random House, Alfred A. Knopf.

   Isabel Fonseca   gives us three things in this book. First off it's a travelogue through post-communist Eastern Europe in the 1990's. Then Fonseca tells us a lot about the Gypsy or Roma history. Above all, she visits one Roma enclave, ghetto or community after another. Now that the Nazi Holocaust wiped out the Jews of Eastern Europe, the Roma are the one people left, that many East Europeans love to scapegoat, hate and often kill. Sometimes the book's details of hate and atrocities can depress you. But Fonseca's research and portraits of the Roma, always enlighten and inform.


      "The Dharma Bums' by Jack Kerouac. Penguin Books 1976.

      Jack Kerouac, the so-called  'King of the Beatniks' was when you look back at him, the ultimate tourist of North America. His books weren't really novels. They were travelogues. "This is typing, not writing" sniffedone of Kerouac's contemporaries, Truman Capote abot Kerouac's novel or book 'On The Road.'But who cares? Kerouac's books take us back into a world of cheap meals, cheap rents, carefree hitchhiking, casual sex and casual drug use.
     'The Dharma Bums' that came out in the early 1960's, show Kerouac and his buddy Japhy Ryder, based on the real life poet Gary Snyder, journey through parts of California nd the Pacific Northwest. There's a lot of what can be called Buddhist Babble' here and hints of Kerouac's growing alcoholism, which helped kill him at the relatively young age of 47. Yet this 50 year-old book sometimes transports us into places of joy and criosity. "I exulted," he writes "to see a beautiful dry riverbottom with white sand and just a trickle river in the middle" Kerouac may have sometimes cursed the conformity of America. But he loved its scenic beauties too.'The Dharma Bums' is proof of that.