In this richly detailed memoir, Juliette de Bairacli Levy - one of the founders of American herbalism - offers us a rare documentary. It is at once an herbal, a travel book and a compendium of Gypsy lore and Gypsy ways.

Juliette gives us river winds, strange characters in the streets by day, rats scurrying by at night, and legions of cockroaches in the apartments, against whose window the blossoms of apple and pear trees toss, even in the great city's cement heart.