Snag Your Copy Little Money Street Written And Illustrated By Fernanda Eberstadt Accessible From Digital Format

couldn't renew it any more at the library, and it was hard to really get into it.
although i definitely learned a little, and enjoyed what i did read, I have been meaning to read this book for a long time so I am glad I finally got around to it.
I have always been interested in gypsies and their culture and living in Spain I am around a lot of them.
For that reason, I enjoyed the book, however I feel that the author didn't always stay true to her journalisitic integrity while describing certain aspcets of Mediterranean and gypsy life.
For example, while describing the case of a woman known as Mere Noel Mrs Santa Claus who was arrested while trying to steal overworth of Christmas gifts for her children the author called the person who turned Mere Noel into the police as deserving to "rot in hell.
" While my heart does go out to Mere Noel for wanting to provide nice gifts for her children at Christmas and I do think her treatment by the French justice system was harsh, shoplifting is a crime and describing the person who reports a crime in this way is not showing journalistic neutrality.
All in all a good book and worth reading, For those who are seriously interested, I know the intention of this book was to be more a kitchen table rather than a scientific study of a neighborhood and culture, but the entirety of it frustrated me.
The tedious minutia of family relations who was whose father was as annoying as the Gitan preference to maintain la loi gitane.


“Fifty years ago the explanation for Gypsy illiteracy was nomadism, how could you go to school when you never spent more than a month in the same town.
Now that the government policies all over Europe have made sure Gypsies are sedentary, and they find Gypsies still dont want to go to school and there is a whole new set of explanations.
”

However, after reading Little Money Street I will be purchasing some CDs by both the Gypsy Kings and Tekameli, so for that fact alone Ive added an extra star to my review.

What I liked about this book was learning about private gypsy culture marriage, mores for women and men, and the music.
As I was reading the book, I thought of the holocaust in which,,gypsies were murdered, and that this fear of persecution lingers and would cause an insular society to be skeptical about outsiders.
I also liked the history that Eberstadt inserted into the book,

What I did not like was Eberstadt's blindness to her own bigotry, She described various gypsies as "nut brown" which nut macadamia, walnut, pecan or caramel color, Really degrading. Yet, not once did she describe a caucasian as "peach color" or "color of a peeled apple, " Whether or not she expected her "friends" to read the book, she certainly took a superior position in describing them.

The author clearly believes that her life is a better one because she takes her kids to museums.
But can they play flamenco on guitar at age five

What I came to feel was that Eberstadt saw these people through the lens of her own value system and they were found lacking.
They were poor. She was not.

But poverty doesn't have to be defined in terms of money or sophistication, The Romanis are family conscious, supportive of each other, but not literate, not pushing standard rote education on their kids.
The Romani attitude about life was not to "get ahead" to strive and achieve, And, why bother, because the common bigotry toward the Romani prevents them from getting the kind of jobs that Eberstadt respects.


At the end, my understanding of the Romani from this book reminded me of the American Indians people who were free to roam, to create, to hunt, to dance and sing who were told their culture was wrong and they needed to accept a new religion, cut their hair, stop speaking their own language and live confined on a reservation.
Why can't they just be like us and go to school, get ahead, strive and achieve

To begin, a passage that embodies everything that attracted me to and eventually repelled me from Little Money Street:

“The few classical remnants that have been unearthed attest to the areas Mediterranean spirit of metissage, or mixity: a deposit of lead votive prayers addressed to the local nymphs, the Niskae, were found by the thermal springs of ArlessurTech and lost, in.
These prayers were composed in a mixture of Celtic, street Latin, and Iberian a nonIndoEuropean language which has not yet been fully cracked.
”

The good news is that there are about forty things up there that set off my neural fireworks: nymphs, uncrackable languages, FrancoCelts, and madeup words mixity, my ass, but I applaud the effort.
But tell me, does anyone out there know what a “lead votive prayer” even is I actually would like to find out, but too bad, because the next sentences or paragraphs, or chapters do not follow, much less provide background to, what preceded.
And call me oldfashioned, but if you blithely mention that something was lost in, you had better tell me how.
This happens repeatedly, Eberstadt depositing the flotsam and jetsam of her obviously capacious mind into innocent paragraphs like some sort of, I dont know, noun terrorist.
I have no personal or academic interest in Gypsy culture, but my complaint is that for even the lessthan serious reader, there is too little here, too poorly explained.
Nymphs/Celts/mixity inherently fascinate, but theyve been reduced to cock teases, I feel awful, being down on something that is so clearly personal, but even books that are no more than cobbledtogether anecdotes deserve more than the baffling degree of sloppiness displayed here any existing structure was not comprehensible to my mind, but maybe I was distracted by all the dangling prepositions.
I finished Little Money Street, but the whole time I wanted to run into the pixellated arms of Wikipedia, and that is just sad.


Sorry, Fernanda. I don't want to ready your namsy pamsy "Look at me!" travelogue, I'd rather read the Twilight series, And that might be the most mean spirited thing I've ever written on this site, This book is a mess of a nonfiction, a wannabe novel that stood up and declared itself to be true, therefore it didn't

have to make sense.


The narrative can't decide what it wants to be, It switches between several stories, The first is a somewhat interesting tale of a privileged white woman who thinks "Gypsies" are magic, She tracks down the object of her obsession, and finds it lacking,

Meanwhile, factoids about geography, local history, and "Gypsy" music are vomited out with no regard for narrative flow, or how much or little background the reader might have in these subjects.
I know next to nothing about the geography and people of southern France, for instance, and so long, romantic passages about how awesome they are just left me confused and waiting for illumination.


That makes it sound like I hated it, and I didn't, There were some cool moments, and some good music recommendations, An awful lot of the book, though, felt like a paddedout Readers Digest travelogue,

The strongest scene in the book is when the author has a goingaway party, and mixes her "Gypsy" and mainstream French friends.
One of her Romani friends performs some songs, and her French friends assume he's the hired entertainment, until he gets sick of people ignoring him and walks off.
Later, there's a spontaneous jam session, and everyone has a grand old time,

Sadly, that scene comes toward the end of the book, The rest of the narrative is dry and unfeeling,

When I got to the end of this book, all I could think was that it was no wonder the St.
Jacques "Gypsies" were so leery of the press at the beginning of this book, Supposedly, the author liked them, And yet, the book comes across as simultaneously romanticized to the point of fairy tale, yet disgusted and looking down her nose at these poor, exotic weird people.
It's a mean feat, and I mean that in many senses of the word, .