Growing up Amish : a memoir

 by Ira Wagler. *Starred Review* Like many other memoirs, this is the record of an unhappy youth. It reports no physical or mental cruelty, however, other than a four-year-old's overly candid remark and commonplace, though still sickening, schoolyard bullying. What readers may see as cultural cruelty the doctrinaire social archaism of the Amish Wagler probably doesn't and never did. Yet he rebelled against his upbringing because he wanted to live in a wider world. As a young teenager, he and five buddies conspired to smoke and drink. When he was 16, he sneaked away from home in the night, leaving a note under his pillow. He worked on a cattle ranch for several months, then went back home.It was the first of many departures and returns, until he met a very rare person, a convert to the Amish (who as, Wagler says, have been vanishingly few) who made him confident in his Christianity, thereby enabling him not to come back but to leave permanently. Wagler grinds no axes; this is not an argumentative or polemical book. Chaste in vocabulary, limpid in exposition, masterfully but never self-importantly focused on its author's experience and reflection, it is a fine literary achievement as well as a calming reassurance that Christianity is a religion, not an institution. --Booklist (Check Catalog)