Rumspringa: To Be or Not to Be Amish » (First Edition)

Tom Shachtman is an award-winning documentarian and the author of many books, including Skyscraper Dreams, Around the Block, and The Day America Crashed.

Rumspringa is Tom Shachtman's celebrated look at a littleknown Amish coming-of-age ritual, the rumspringa—the period of "running around" that begins for their youth at age sixteen. During this time, Amish youth are allowed to live outside the bounds of their faith, experimenting with alcohol, premarital sex, revealing clothes, telephones, drugs, and wild parties. By allowing such broad freedoms, 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 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 "one of the most absorbing books ever written about the Plain People" (Publishers Weekly).

Publishers Weekly

A teenage Amish girl sits in her buggy, one hand dangling a cigarette while the other holds a cellphone in which she is loudly chatting away. This girl, like many Amish teens 16 and older, is in a period called rumspringa, when the strict rules of community life are temporarily lifted while an adolescent chooses whether to be baptized into the church and abide fully by its laws. Shachtman, a documentarian who began studying this phenomenon for the film The Devil's Playground, is a sensitive and nimble chronicler of Amish teens, devoting ample space to allowing them to tell their stories in their own words. And their stories are fascinating, from the wild ones who engage in weekend-long parties, complete with hard drugs and sexual promiscuity, to the more sedate and pious teens who prefer to engage in careful courtship rituals under the bemused eyes of adult Amish chaperones. Shachtman's tone is by turns admiring-of the work ethic, strong families and religious faith that undergird Amish life-and critical, especially of the sect's treatment of women and its suspicion of education beyond the eighth grade. Throughout, Shachtman uses the Amish rumspringa experience as a foil for understanding American adolescence and identity formation in general, and also contextualizes rumspringa throughout the rapidly growing and changing Amish world. This is not only one of the most absorbing books ever written about the Plain People but a perceptive snapshot of the larger culture in which they live and move. (June) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

A Note to the Reader     xi
"Going Away"     3
"A Glory Old Time"     34
Straightforward Conversations"     60
Education: "Prepare for Usefulness"     91
Faith and Doctrine: "Stand Fast and Believe the Word as Written"     116
Shunning: To Keep the Church "Pure"     148
Farming: "The Ideal Occupation"     173
"Working Away"     189
"Women's Lib Would Have a Field Day Among the Amish"     211
Seeking Solutions     232
"Coming Home"-An Essay     251
Note     273
Selected Bibliography     281
Acknowledgments     285