Serpent's Tail sent me Princes Amongst Men: Journeys with Gypsy Musicians a few months ago. It moved back and forth in the pile of requested/unrequested books until I decided about two weeks ago to give it a good try. I have never read anything at all about the Gypsy people or their music and other than their losses in WWII (they were also targetted by Hitler for ethnic cleansing), I really didn't know much about them. Maybe it's because of that that Garth Cartwright's book has been such a revelation on so many levels.
Cartwright is a journalist and was clearly very familiar with Gypsy music long before the trips he made in research for the book. Several times in the narrative he mentions meeting singers/musicians before or listening to their music for years. He traveled all over the former Yugoslavia as well as Romania and Bulgaria tracking some great music and the people who make it. Along the way he has managed to write not just an impressive collection of interviews with a lot of cool people that most of us have never heard of (but should have) but also a contemporary look at the societies and politics of the Balkans and Eastern Europe. In a lot of ways this book tells us more about what happened to Yugoslavia than a lot of war books because it focuses so much on the people and landscape, not on the leaders and the military. And throughout it all he keeps making advances on all things Gypsy, keeps trying to understand who they are, the music they love and the struggles they face in European society. There is just a wealth of information here but it is so well written so comfortable to read that you don't realize how much you are learning. In other words this is no dry academic tome. You just want to keep traveling along with Cartwright and reading his observations of who he meets and what he sees.
I'll have a long review of this great book in the Summer issue of Eclectica (at least that's the plan now). It was a real treat, and just more proof of what a very cool press Serpent's Tail is.
(You can learn a lot more about the book and the Gypsy musicians at the web site, Journeys with Gypsies.)
