Customer Reviews

Amish Roots: A Treasury of History, Wisdom, and Lore (Center Books in Anabaptist Studies)

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Slow down and savour each page of this gem... "We are not Amish, we are Christians. Amish is just a nickname. We don't need to be ashamed that people call us that but we shouldn't build on the Amish name." William A. Yoder

This quote from the book sticks most in my mind after reading this collection of first-hand accounts of Amish life, gathered from personal and family documents by the Amish people themselves, dating from the 1700's to the present day.

This is their story, told their way. I found that most refreshing.

An honest portrayal of a community of people struggling to maintain the purity of their faith and love for their fellow man in a world that seems set to undermine everything they stand for. Rightly called a "Treasury", and presenting both the joys and the hardships of the Amish way of life, this book was hard to put down, and left me aching for a time when the world and the way we lived in it was much simpler fare.....

A very informative book on the history and culture of the Amish people. Also an insight to their everyday life and customs.

I have occasionally felt that the Amish live as close to how true Christian should as any sect. Of course I have no way to gather evidence as there is only One Person to judge that and by the time I meet Him, neither I nor the Amish will care much about denominational differences. Yet I have something of an envy of the Amish with their tight neighborliness and old-fashioned ways. Though I doubt I would have the resolution to live like them.
This is a book of tales and anecdotes told by the Amish and those who know them. It gives a little about Amish history and culture, but it is mostly anecdotes.

These tales show bits of country life, day to day scenes and so on. The sort of thing I found touching was the pious devotion. It wasn't just admiration, it was a feeling of recognition. That was the sort of thing I have always seen in my Church. Of course I hardly claim my own sanctity(doing so would be wearisome to me and the reader and of course only one Judge of that matters making the exercise pointless). Rather I claim a sense of kinship. It doesn't awe me or frighten me as much as someone who is not used to it: I know Assemblies of God are human; I certainly know I am human. And I vaguely suspect Amish are human. And there you are.

Unfortunately I couldn't enjoy the book as much as I would like. People who do not scheme for power, pillage, or destroy can make dull tales. People who are prosperous, contented and never betray each other have a hard time being entertaining to us Englishers. The fact is that the Amish are to nice to have a life interesting from the outside. Their tales can be rather boring. In fact Plain Folk can be rather plain. The world could use a whole lot more of such plainness. But Englishers sometimes like a little fanciness in a story.

Be that as it may, better anecdotes could have been found. It's not that they were terribly bad, but that they were not memorable. Settings like this have made good fiction before, and it is hard to believe they never make good anecdotage. I would like to have had more about Amish traditions and such-like. And the book is sometimes rather preachy, and ironically, given the Amish reputation rather new-fangled style preachiness: to much about "materialism" and not enough about "worldly vanities". Be that as it may, the book is a reasonably good effort at paying a tribute to a people who have dedicated themselves to giving glory to God, who have built an attractive community, and have the glorious task of having no inclination whatsoever of being relevant to the modern world.

I bought this book because I was interested in learning about the way in which the Amish have managed to build a society free of the anguish and purposelessness so usual in ours. Well, this book only partially succeeded in giving me the information I wanted. I would gladly have exchanged uninteresting extracts, such as the homemade remedies and recipes, or the verses written by teenagers in their albums (in much the same way as many non-Amish teenagers I know), for more substantial information. Often, the author awoke my interest in one subject, but then did not provide enough information to satisfy that interest. The "what happened next" is usually lacking. For instance, I would have liked to know more about the Amish reaction to the movie "Witness", about which only a vague, disjointed letter is offered as a sample. At other times, the stories or extracts seem so irrelevant as to be laughable, as in the story about the man who bought a pair of shoes and left his old ones inside a box in the shop, to play a joke on the salesboy. The choice of illustrations (mostly of decorated front pages of Bibles, or fairly simple and unremarkable drawings)is poor, and could have been better if photographs of Amish people and their farmsteads had been included. Also, the "criticism of the Amish" section seems fairly mild when compared to the sky-high praise lavished on them in other selections. This makes the global picture rather subjective. Criticising their rejection of technology seems pretty lukewarm, when you think of more debatable subjects, such as the role of women in Amish society, or their preventing their children from attaining higher education. My intention here is not to criticize a society I'm only beginning to learn about (and which I find, I must confess, fascinating in its quiet way), but to highlight some aspects of it that are barely dwelt upon in this book, which seems concerned only with showing the Amish in the most favorable light. Maybe the general dullness and scantness of the material is due to what the author of the book mentions throughout - the reluctance of the Amish to write about themselves. If so, it's a pity, for, in "Amish Roots", you only get a dull and colorless picture of what is undoubtedly a complex and mistifying way of life.