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To Be or Not to Be Amish
North Point Press
June 2006
304 pages ISBN: 086547687X Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
A revelatory look at Amish youth as they have never been
looked at
before Rumspringa
is a fascinating look at a little-known Amish
coming-of-age ritual, the rumspringa—the period of
“running around” that begins for their youth at age sixteen.
Through vivid portraits of teenagers in Ohio and Indiana,
Tom Shachtman offers an account of Amish life as a mirror
to the soul-searching and questing that we recognize as a
generally intrinsic part of adolescence. The
trappings of the Amish way of life—the “plain” clothes and
electricity-free farms—conceal the communities’ mystery: how
they manage to retain their young people and perpetuate
themselves generation after generation. The key to this is
the rumspringa, when Amish youth are allowed to live
outside the bounds of their faith, experimenting with
alcohol, premarital sex, trendy clothes, telephones, drugs,
and wild parties. By allowing them such freedom, their
parents hope they will learn enough to help them make the
most important decision of their lives—whether to be
baptized as Christians, join the church, and forever give up
worldly ways, or to remain out in the
world.
In this searching book, Shachtman draws
on his skills as a documentarian to capture young people on
the cusp of a fateful decision, and to give us an original
and deeply affecting portrait of the Amish as a whole.
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