| Plain Secrets: An Outsider among the Amish | 
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Avg. Customer Rating:   (based on 20 reviews)
Sales Rank: 47878
Category: Book
Author: Joe Mackall
Publisher: Beacon Press
Studio: Beacon Press
Manufacturer: Beacon Press
Label: Beacon Press
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 248
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 12.6 x 8 x 1.4
ISBN: 0807010650
Dewey Decimal Number: 289
EAN: 9780807010655
ASIN: 0807010650
Publication Date: June 15, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Plain Secrets tells the story of Joe Mackall's long friendship with his Swartzentruber Amish neighbors, the Shetlers, to create a nuanced portrait of this most traditional Amish sect.
"Mackall does the job beautifully, painting an intimate portrait of the family that leaves the reader feeling humbled by the common thread that's woven into all of us."
?Sarah English, Cleveland Magazine
"Prose as graceful as it is unsentimental . . . Mackall doesn't sensationalize, romanticize, or condescend."
?Brigid Brett, Los Angeles Times
"The book points to a difficult truth: A religious community is bound to be freed. Mackall explores this paradox with rare honesty and insight . . . [and] achieves what he promises."
?Tom Montgomery-Fate, Boston Globe
"Mackall describes the details of family, farming and church life with sympathy, accuracy and good will . . . His particularistic description of one family is a welcome addition to what has often been a sociological literature."
?Levi Miller, Christian Century
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| Customer Reviews: Read 15 more reviews...
 Plain Secrets Review January 5, 2009
I purchased this item for a class paper. Although I didn't get a wealth of information from the book, I appreciate the effort to get it to me in a timely manner.
 Excellent account of a relationship December 11, 2008
I very much enjoyed reading this book, and I would recommend it to people who are curious about the day-to-day life of perhaps the most reticent group of Amish in the United States.
I wouldn't recommend the book to people who are motivated by the "secrets" in the title. It's true that the Schwartzentruber (how it's spelled out my way) Amish are harder for the English to get to know than, say, Lancaster County Old Order Amish, but that doesn't make them secretive, nor does the author spill secrets in a hushed tone.
Instead, the book offers a well-written, thoughtful memoir of a friendship between an Amish man and an English man. The structure and pacing are excellent, and I find Mackall's observations to be spot-on. These are portraits of an extended family, not generalizations about all Schwartzentrubers or all Amish or even all farmers.
In fact, I wish that the author had continued in that vein, omitting most of the drama associated with the tale of a young man who chose to leave the church. The book was lovely and fascinating without the subplot. I would disagree with Tolstoy's pronouncement that all happy families are happy in the same way--in other words, boring. The book would have been just fine if the meaning of the friendship between the men, and between their wives, were the entire content.
And now, my beef. The author allows himself two rants--one about the question of the happiness of Amish women, who take a subordinate role, and one about the safety of Amish children. I feel that he stepped out of the relationship in the book to address the reader directly in words he would never use to his friends. In film, we would say that Mackall broke the third wall when he vented his frustration to the readers instead of to his friends. It felt like a violation of the friendship as I read it, and it doubly felt as though Mackall didn't "get" the core of the culture. It's about the faith--the faith that God doesn't make mistakes, the faith that His ways are not our ways, the faith that we are not here to stay.
So this is a very good book, a groundbreaking description of one district of Schwartzentrubers. The subtitle is a much better descriptor than the title, and there are some pages I could have lived without. Even with my reservations, I don't regret the purchase, and I would recommend it to my English friends. I would also read other works by Joe Mackall, because he's an excellent storyteller and painter-with-words.
Fascinating book November 15, 2008
This book gives the reader a rare window into the world of the Swartzentruber Amish. I couldn't put it down.
Plain Secrets was a good book September 7, 2008
I am from West Salem and having lived there and worked at the law office, I could pretty much pick out who he was talking about. I feel Mr. Mackall did a wonderful job of telling the true life of the Amish.
I have seen the shunning of a young man in public, at a auction I attended. It broke my heart. It is not easy for them to just walk away from the only family and way of life they known.
If the Amish interest you as they do me, then this book is the one book to read.Plain Secrets: An Outsider among the Amish
You'll come away with a new perspective about Amish life July 16, 2008
Neither a scholarly treatise nor a vilification, an idealization nor an expose, Joe Mackall's PLAIN SECRETS is a narrative that explores one man's relationship to an Amish family and, by extension, a community.
Mackall, who lives in Ashland County, Ohio, befriends the Shetler family: Samuel, Mary and their nine children (names changed by the author). Over the years, living in close proximity to the Shetlers, Mackall develops as close a relationship with the family as an Englisher might be allowed. What emerges is the peace, beauty and goodness of the culture, as well as the disturbing questions he finds himself asking about legalism, the rights of women and the protection of children. His friendship with the family also helps him learn more about himself. "I have chosen...to mine the raw material of their everyday lives in search of everyday truths," writes Mackall.
It's an immersion into the world of the Swartzentruber, the most traditional and strict of the Amish sects. The Swartzentruber refuse to use reflective signs on the back of their buggies, leave school after the eighth grade, bathe only once a week and carry no insurance. The women are not permitted to wear bras and are not allowed to shave their underarms or legs.
However, there are plenty of surprises. This conservative sect shops at Wal-Mart and loves the Dollar Store, and may enjoy junk food such as Milky Way candy bars and potato chips. Although they don't practice "rumspringa" like many other Amish sects, the Swartzentruber Amish let their teens go on "dates," in which a teenage boy and girl spend the night together, side by side, in her bed. Mackall skillfully weaves other information throughout the narrative: the history of the Swartzentruber, the organization of the church and the ordination of ministers, and Amish perceptions of African Americans.
As part of his exploration, Mackall follows the story of Samuel's nephew Jonas, who leaves the Amish to join the English community. The reader will be alternately intrigued, sympathetic and repelled at how Jonas handles his new-found "freedom." To abandon Amish life, Mackall shows through Jonas's attempt, is to encounter immediate problems. How do you get a Social Security number if your parents refuse to let you have a copy of their marriage license? How do you find a job when you've never gone to school past the eighth grade? The Amish community's culture and rules, Mackall realizes, make it difficult for a child to leave.
Living in close proximity to the Shetler family offers Mackall positive insights as well --- an appreciation and attention to the weather, a realization that he doesn't need as much as he perhaps wants. Mackall, a professor of English and journalism at Ashland University, beautifully pens one particularly haunting scene, which finds him rhythmically tossing butternut squash to Samuel in his truck as they get ready to go to an auction.
"Perhaps it's because the weather is fair and the season is autumn, but suddenly I experience a paroxysm of joy --- sheer, sharp unadulterated joy. I'm suspended between two worlds, an outsider in an outsider's world. I'm here with friends who consider themselves separate from the world but woven into the earth, while we all throw fruits of the earth to one another: seeds planted, sown, produce reaped and cleaned, soon to be sold, bought, and eaten. Toddlers play, teenagers laugh, a friend loses his hat, my back aches, and through it all the beauty and heartbreaking brevity of this life pierce me with their stunning certainty."
Other scenes are not so prosaic. After enjoying his rides in Samuel's buggy and telling others about them "as if I were playing a small part in some quaint drama most people could only watch", he must re-evaluate his thinking after another family's buggy is hit by a car and an eight-year-old girl is killed. This leads to a written personal tirade, which ends with, "Is sticking with your sacred buggies more important than the sanctity of human life? Can't you take care of your children?" Readers will have further concerns when Samuel takes his daughter to a veterinarian for medical treatment or, like all Swartzentrubers, refuses to immunize his children. Mackall's questions as he ponders the less appealing side of Amish life are respectful, vulnerable and thought provoking.
Threaded throughout Mackall's book is Samuel's belief in God's will and how it affects his world. "He talks about God's will the way he reports how much it rained the night before or that one of his cows has the milk disease. God's will is like gravity --- it is rain and dirt and sun and snow and wind and fire and every other elemental thing. It is what it is --- no matter what we do." Despite Mackall's own disagreement with Samuel's theology, he finds himself strangely comforted by it when a disabled uncle dies.
It's these conflicting perceptions that provide the necessary tension that holds Mackall's narrative together. Readers will come away with new perspectives about Amish life and some disturbing questions.
--- Reviewed by Cindy Crosby
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