Tom Shachtman

Rumspringa (eBook, ePUB)

To Be or Not to Be Amish

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

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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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Seitenzahl: 304
• Erscheinungstermin: 29. Mai 2007
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781466805132
• Artikelnr.: 39952587

Autorenporträt

Tom Shachtman has published forty books, most recently The Memoir of the Minotaur (Madville Publishing, 2020). His histories include The Day America Crashed, Skyscraper Dreams, Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold, and The Founding Fortunes; his social analyses, Rumspringa and The Inarticulate Society; non-fiction children's books such as Growing Up Masai; and an eclectic trilogy of short novels about sea lions, Beachmaster, Wavebender, and Driftwhistler. His award-winning documentaries have aired on ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, and BBC. He holds degrees in experimental psychology and in drama and has taught writing at NYU and lectured at Harvard, Georgia Tech, the Library of Congress, Stanford, and other institutions.