Customer Reviews

Bulgaria (Cultures of the World, Second)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

If you are looking for some real insight about Bulgaria, this is NOT the book to get. I know so much about this charming country and its people. When I saw the book at the library, I was terrified at the way they were presented! There were none of the values and beauty this country has that I could show my daughter in this book. Take any other book on the subject and I am sure you will get a more correct picture on the subject.

If you are looking for some real insight about Bulgaria, this is NOT the book to get.
Bulgaria and its people are charming and great.
Bulgaria has a Great History, one of the oldest countries in Europe. The truth culture of Bulgaria is full with a lot of beautiful things, and Gypsies are not so key point in it.
Please, all readers, if you want to have a view over Bulgarian Culture, don't buy this book and in any case don't give it to your children.

This book is part of a series on the cultures of the world. It is like reading an extended encyclopedia entry on the country portrayed. This book glosses over geography, history, government, economy, and social issues.

The history section is weak and unimpressive. There is so much history that has to be omitted because the section is limited to 8-10 pages and accompanied by photographs. You also do not get much of an idea of what life in the country is really like. Generalized statements like "the people of Bulgaria do . . . " Really. They all do this? This is like saying the people of Minnesota all play hockey. No we don't.

This book is meant for grade school children so the rougher aspects of history and the economy are sanitized. If your schoolchild has a report due on a country, this book gives the necessary overview. But there is so much more to Bulgaria than this boook alludes to.

I have been very puzzled by the reader reviews of this book. I've read it and it is nothing like what some of the reviews say. There are four pages on Bulgarian minorities out of a 130 page book, and half a dozen pictures of minority individuals. I think it is probably just the cover that these reviewers object to. But they should know that authors of books like these rarely choose the pictures, and never the cover. The marketing department chooses a cover photo that they think will help sell the book. No doubt they had no idea that the cover would arouse anger and negative reviews, or they would not have chosen it. Since it's a book for kids, they probably saw it as just a cute picture of some smiling kids that would appeal to other kids.

I imagine that at least some of the reviewers have never read the book. I hope they will do so and discover that the actual text of the book gives a positive portrayal of this wonderful country, certainly as positive as other books of this type on other countries. My impression is that it was written with a deep love for Bulgaria's culture and heritage. It is certainly worth reading, and then if a reader objects to the cover, they should write to the publisher and explain why it should be changed. Publishers want to please customers, and if they get several such letters, they are likely to respond.

The Bulgarians have a nice proverb: "The clothes are the first thing that helps me to get some impression about you!". So imagine the clothes are the cover of the book. I really dont care anymore whatever it is inside, this is really a crime, as it has been said and the author, the publishers and Roumyana as well have to shame theirself. I doubt that this book was published in Bulgaria? Simply, because nobody will buy over there this garbage (the cover talks enough about the content). Of course this is the best way to make money through sensation, probably somebody will be intrigued from those gypses and will buy, i could even say this very expensive book. I know in USA people have already seen few movies about the bulgarian gypsies thanks of people like you looking for sensations. But how hte americans have changed the life standart of the bg gypsies:) This is a crime what are you doing with your own country. This is not an yellow newspaper, this is a book addressed to children. How your own children will feel if the classmates starts to laugh at them, seeing the horrible picture. God will judge your greedeness for money and glory!

Dear Kirilka Stavreva and Roumyana Slabakova, if 6-7% of the bulgarians are gypsies, are they BULGARIA and how these smiled gypsies contribute to the World Cultural Heritage. Roumjana your way of thinking is pretty primitive, all kids are beautiful and likes to smile, remember - ALL!!! But when you are talking about the Bulgaria Cultural Heritage and would like to address this to the children, why didn't the author or the publisher thought of having some photo with children folk ansamble with typical bulgarian national costumes. Or what about a photo from any of the gorgeous monasteries located in the foot of the picturesque mountains (which through the centures preserved the bulgarian culture). Or even combining both of them.

And for those who doesnt know many buildings in BG really look in a similiar way, but thanks of the socialism time, every bulgarian family has his own roof, most of the families own more than one huge appartment and at least one rancho. We did not have any homelless people during the socialism time and the number of the homeless people is not so high as in USA or Canada.

Our country is one of the most beautiful in the world and I encourage everybody to visite it, but please be aware of these gypsies. They have chosen their own way of surviving by stealing!

If you want to know something about Bulgaria, I highly reccomend you a book, which is more than only a travel guide called "Rough Guide about Bulgaria", where you will find not only wonderful photoes but also very valuable hystorical and cultural information.

I also happen to be a Bulgarian, but I find Roumyana Slabakova review very narrow-minded and incompetent. She has obviously decided to praise the author no matter what the book really represents.

There is no way this book is "a reflection of that life and that country" or that "book offers a balanced view of present-day Bulgaria" since most of the book (more than 50%!) focuses on the culture and life of Gipsy and Turkish minorities in Bulgaria (representing about 12% of the population). How such representation could be called "balanced"?

The title and the initial words in the book claim to present the culture of Bulgaria, not the culture of the Bulgarian minorities.
If the book was not making such claims, there would be nothing wrong with the content or the pictures, and especially the picture on the cover.

I am sure the reviewer Roumyana Slabakova, living in the USA, is very much aware of the unwritten agreement in the USA that there should be a balance of representing minority groups in advertising or writing about the American culture as a WHOLE: one cannot escape noticing that especially in the pictures of children in the USA used in books or advertising, there are shown always the faces of at least three minority groups.

And indeed such balance can be found on the cover of another book from the SAME series: "Fiji (Cultures of the World, Set 20)".

That it is why I don't find standing the reviewer's argument that it is OK to show ONLY Gipsy children on the cover of a book titled "Bulgaria (Cultures of the world)".
As per how much "representative" and "natural" a picture showing a "typical" apartment building as opposed to "ladies in folk costumes", the reviewer should have done some more research to find that COUNTLESS other books from the SAME series ("Cultures of the World") and SAME publisher (Benchmark Books) - those on Denmark, Cambodia, Tibet, Netherlands, Zimbabwe, Canada, Panama, Iceland, Finland, Sudan, Ukraine, Kenia, Peru, Lithuania, Tahiti, Laos, Belarus, Scotland, Grenada and many others - show exactly such pictures of people in national costumes.
(All can be found on Amazon.com's web site.)

Should the reviewer have found these facts, she might have asked herself if it is a mere coincidence that in the ALL other books from the series, the publisher has chosen to show anything else but not a picture of miserable apartment building (even in books on African countries where the standard of living is much lower than the one in Bulgaria and the majority of the homes look worse than those in Bulgaria) nor only faces of minorities (see the books from the same series on Burma, Luxemburg, Honduras, Malta, Moldova, exception is the book on Australia; all can be found on Amazon.com's site)

And all the above no matter that none of the books on the above mentioned countries are not "travel brochures" or "advertisement".

The publisher clearly failed to balance both the first impression (the cover page picture) and the content in a book claiming to be on Bulgaria's culture.

The children on the cover are roma not bulgarian.The roma minority DO NOT CONSIDER THEMSELVS TO BE PART OF BULGARIAN NATION OR CULTURE.Nothing against them they have their oun culture which is very rich and interesting...but has nothing in common with the bulgarian culture.

This book has tons of great photos showing many aspects of Bulgarian culture and geography, which I grew to love through a few years spent there. I was thrilled when I found the book in the library and later when I purchased a copy. Regarding the cover: yeah, even my wife who is a Bulgarian Roma thought it was a little weird that they should put Gypsy kids on the front. But the Roma do form a substantial minority in Bulgaria, and the background apartment building is typical, regardless of the tenants' ethnicity. Read the negative reviews of this book with a grain of salt, for many of them are simply racist (which also happens to be a rather typical trait of some Bulgarians).

A total misrepresentation of the Bulgarian Culture starting with the picture on the cover of the book. If you want to learn something about that country and its rich history and culture, you better look somewhere else...

I believe that either the author is willingly trying to misrepresent Bulgarian culture or she is was challenged by the task of lining up support elements of her book's thesis.

One of the major argumentative fallacies embedded in the author's rhetoric is the errouneous assumption that Bulgarians and Bulgarian Romas share the same culture. Just like descriptive statistics for the African American community in the U.S. and Americans in general differ widely, so do they for the Romas and the Bulgarians. The assumption of equivalence is implicit in both the visual imagery throughout the book and the introduction of the book.

For example, unemployment is unusually high among Romas(Gypsies), exceeding a shocking 90 percent in some rural areas. Moreover, only one percent of them have higher education, 36 percent have reached only primary education, 40 percent have secondary education, and 16 percent of them are totally illiterate, according to official data dating from 1998. These statistics related to the minority do not apply to the Bulgarian population at large.

Furthermore, the book's author fails to recognize that while Bulgarian gypsies are integral part of Bulgarian society, they constitute only 6-7 percent of the Bulgarian population according to recent EU Census data. However, images of Bulgarian gypsies make up far more than 6-7 percent of all images in the book. They visually mislead the reader to think that the average Joe Schmoe Bulgarian looks, dresses and behaves as the people in those pictures.

The psychologist Becca Levy of Yale University says "What's so frightening is that the stereotype, at least in the short run, overwhelms long-held beliefs.".

I am afraid that while the author of this book might appeal to a westerner temporarily by evoking images of an exotic "other", they also fossilize a stereotype, which simply does not translate well to the reality in the country. Most of the country is, in fact, quite different from one might be lead to believe and certainly much more beautiful than the images suggest.

Unless you are planning a trip to the Gypsies' quarters in some of the major Bulgarian cities or you are a scholar in ethnography or anthropoloy, I would strongly discourage you from buying this book as a source of reliable information.

Alternatively, I will suggest James Pettifer's book "Blue Guide Bulgaria (Blue Guides)".