Sunday, January 8, 2012

"Growing Up Amish" by Ira Wagner

272 pages

Ira Wagler was the ninth child of a Canadian Amish couple's eleven children. As a restless, independent spirit, he always felt out of place in the strict society he grew up in. At seventeen, in the middle of the night, he left home for the first time. This kicked off nearly a decade of going back and forth between the Amish world and the secular as he struggled to figure out where he belonged. In this memoir, he describes what it was like growing up Old World Amish and what it felt like to leave it for a strange new world.

I grew up in a small town with a considerable Amish population, so this book grabbed my eye when I saw it on the shelf. The Amish I knew were friendly but kept many things to themselves, so I was curious about what it was like to be part of that community. Wagler is open and honest about his experience, sharing both the good (tight sense of community and a strong support system) with the bad (black-and-white thinking, discouragement of independent thinking). Some parts seemed a bit repetitive to me, and I think he could have summarized some of the experiences and left out redundant details. Nevertheless, this is a really interesting story gives readers an inside look at Amish culture. It's also a story about one man growing up and finding his place in the world, which almost everyone can relate to.

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