Title: Rumspringa: To Be Or Not To Be Amish
Author: Tom Shachtman
Date of publication: 2006
Pages: 286
Genre: Nonfiction
Count for Year: 4
I remember when I read this book earlier in the year that I found it to be good, but a little bit difficult for me to finish, when it got bogged down in the sociological views of the Amish from various academia. More telling and captivating were the stories of the Amish youth themselves who went on rumspringa, the time when Amish youth at the age of 16 are “running around” in order to choose whether to stay with the Order or go out and live their own lives in the world. The book was based on interviews and research done for the documentary, “The Devil’s Playground”. I think the movie, in this case, was better than the book, because it told the story a little more succinctly than the book, but still for those who want a peek into one aspect of Amish life, this is a good place to start.
Final analysis: 7/10.
Personally, this is the book I really want to read about the Amish:
Title: Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Grace
Authors: Donald B. Kraybill, Steven M. Nolt, David L. Weaver-Zercher
Date of Publication: 2007
Pages: 256
Count for Year: To Be Determined
At the beginning of this month, I heard Weaver-Zercher speak at a special scholarship dinner at Messiah College, where he is chair of the religion department. The book centers on the Oct. 2, 2006 incident in Nickel Mines, Pa. where a gunman took an Amish school hostage and eventually killed five girls before committing suicide. In the end, the Amish families affected ended up forgiving the gunman and his family by even attending the funeral. After the dinner, Weaver-Zercher had autographed copies of the book by all three authors at a special price, and I couldn’t resist picking up a copy. Currently, my mother is reading it and when she’s done, I plan to read it in the near future.
Now I’m going to take a break from my regularly scheduled reviewing (on which I’m only getting started and which is going to take me a few more days — or weeks — to catch up) for this meme that I saw over (and stole even though I wasn’t invited) at The Ax For The Frozen Sea:
The Top 106 Books Most Often Marked As “Unread” By LibraryThing’s Users.
Strike-through for books I’ve read before.
Italics for books I’ve read before but haven’t finished.
Copy and paste on your blog to see how “pretentious” you are.
And, remember, it’s all in good fun.
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Aeneid
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere (it’s the next book I’m reading, honest)
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
Well, with only 38 of the 106 read, I’m only 35.8 percent pretentious and also not quite the reading fool I claim to be. It looks like I have some work to do in both areas.
I grew up in a small village in northeastern Pennsylvania called Laddsburg. This poem is memories of Laddsburg.
In The Little Village Where I Grew Up
Around this corner Stu was unable
to straighten the wheel, avoid that pole,
and in this very hayfield the tractor would not
stop from popping out of gear, rolling over L.J.
In the movies, bullets halt in mid-flight,
seconds before they reach flesh and bone,
but here, no one could stop the tractor trailer
from sliding down the icy hill, careening into Mike
and almost killing him. Here, migraines still pound,
nitroglycerin tablets still don’t change Elmer
from what he always was, and is: a mean old cuss.
Here, the strop with which my uncle went to hit
my grandfather continues its descent toward him,
and my grandfather continues to stop it and walk
out the front door of the barn, never to return.
My Grandpa Robinson, the one referred to in the previous poem, died on the day after my 10th birthday. In this poem, I look back on that day.
June 10, 1979
Elmer and I are fishing the swimming hole
when my father calls from the bridge above,
“It’s your grandpa,” as if he was on the phone.
I arrive at the house, am escorted to the porch
by my uncles, who ask to see the birthday gift
I received the previous day, my first jackknife.
Opening it, I cut across the whorls of my thumb.
Inside, washing the wound, red lines the yellow
porcelain sink. Like blood from the first trout
we cleaned, skinned together in this same sink.
My thumb turns pale, the complexion he wears
lying in the room next to the kitchen. I sit now
in the recliner there, use that thumb on his diary,
discover only weather reports in his entries:
“warm, sunny, 70s today, wind at 8 mph
from the NNW, 29.08 on the barometer.”
This one is a memory of my Grandpa Fields and as with my Grandpa Robinson is a memory of fishing.
Emerald Isle
When Grandpa picked the dobro, he’d drift
back to when he and Uncle Thelbert dreamed
of making their debut at the Grand Ole Opry,
and forward to when he and Grandma could retire,
both move out to a beach house on Emerald Isle.
We’d cast our lines off the side of the pier
to catch blue fish and flounder, but once
he hired a guide take us out in his boat to trawl
the Bogue Banks for the larger king mackerel
he always wanted to reel in out on the pier’s end,
to test his line beyond its strength,
see if it would hold.
————————————————————————————————————————————————-
My Grandpa Fields listened to the radio late at night. One of the things I remember most vividly when our family went to visit him in North Carolina, usually for Christmas, was him surfing through the channels on the radio dial. I remember listening to the radio along with him from the room where I stayed. Later in high school and college, I found myself surfing the radio dial late into the night.
Continuing Granddad’s Legacy
I surf the AM waves
nights after the Late Show, tune in/
tune out women radio shrinks, traffic
reports, talk shows that use words like
“premature.” I always leave one ear open
for the slap of leather against
backboards, sneakers on wooden floors,
the other for the Mutual Broadcasting Network
brings you Larry King Live,
except come spring when both listen for
the Scooter to announce for the Yanks.
Unrealistically I seek a voice as harsh
as Ella’s “Basin Street Blues,” silky
as Sarah’s “Always,” understanding as
Dr. Joy Brown, or contradictory as Rush
on the FM. I will never find anything as foreign
as the Cuban propaganda pirate stations,
enticing as Texas radio there, as on the flip.
Like Granddad, I am learning to appreciate
the Grand Ole Opry, yet also crave to hear
more “race” records, bebop, the Big Beat.
I am continuing his legacy in my own way,
trying to pick up some whisper of
sanity, some voice of reason to speak to me.
For this week’s edition of Tuesday’s Tunes, I dig deep into my CD collection and pull out this gem:
Atlantic Rhythm & Blues: 1947-1974 Box Set
8 CDs
I remember I purchased this collection at least 15 years ago when receiving money from taxes could go to such frivolous things. Not too far out of college, I was living with my parents at the time and thought receiving a tax refund of $500 or so was pretty cool, so I purchased a boxload of CDs from Rhino Records, including this set, which I didn’t really know much about it. However, I wanted to learn more about that kind of music: rhythm & blues, and I thought this would be a good place to start.
Other CDs I bought that spring included:
The Sun Story — a collection from Sun Records, featuring early Elvis, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison
The Best of George Jones: 1955-1967
The Disco Years: Vol 1: Turn The Beat Around
The Best of K.C. & the Sunshine Band
In Yo’ Face: The History of Funk, Vol.1
a Jimmie Rodgers collection, which I can’t remember the name of right now
But the big purchase, which I received for under $100, and was quite a bargain at the time, was this collection, and it wasn’t a good place to start to explore classic rhythm and blues. No, it wasn’t good at all. In fact, it was a great place to start.
Disc 1: This one is probably my least favorite, but that’s probably because I’m not as familiar with the music from this era as I am with the rest. However, the Clovers’ “One Mint Julep” and Stick McGhee’s “Drinking Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee” are the stand-outs here for me, and we are introduced to Ruth Brown.
Disc 2: Here, we have more Ruth Brown, and then Ray Charles and Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, one of the many incarnations of The Drifters over the years. McPhatter later would go out on his own and is featured on other discs in this collection.
Disc 3: This is where the real classics begin, in my opinion, with the introduction of “Smokey Joe’s Cafe” by The Robins and then The Coasters, whose connection not only was founder of the Coasters, Carl Gardner, but also the incredible song-writing team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. Leiber and Stoller penned such Coasters’ classics as “Down In Mexico” and “Searchin’,” both of which are featured on this disc.
Disc 4: And this is where the collection begins to get on a roll, with the likes of Chuck Willis and Clyde McPhatter to start. But then kicks in “The Right Time” by Ray Charles, made famous on The Cosby Show, and then “What I’d Say, Parts 1 and 2,” also by Charles. As if that wasn’t enough for one disc, the Drifters contribute “Dance with Me,” “This Magic Moment” and “Save the Last Dance for Me”. But wait, there’s more with Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me” and Lavern Baker’s “Saved.”
Disc 5: This disc not only continues the roll, but takes it to a completely another level with what to me is the best song on the entire collection, “You Don’t Miss Your Water” by William Bell. Of course, that’s not all, with Solomon Burke’s “Cry To Me,” King’s “Don’t Play That Song (You Lied)” and Don Covay’s “Mercy Mercy,” later done by The Rolling Stones. And, oh, just thrown in for good measure, another artist I had never heard of, Joe Tex with “Hold What You’ve Got,” which is a scorcher.
Disc 6:Here comes more Joe Tex and then Otis Redding with “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” and Wilson Pickett with “In the Midnight Hour” and, of course, “Mustang Sally.”
Disc 7: Aretha tops this disc, but the stand-out tracks here are Clarence Carter’s “Slip Away” and “Too Weak To Fight,” and Les McCann and Eddie Harris’ “Compared to What,” which is on the jazzy side, but is amazing.
Disc 8: The collection cools down with a good helping of The Spinners, famous for “Mighty Love” and “Could It Be I’m Fallin’ In Love,” included here. King Floyd’s “Groove Me” and the Persuaders’ “Thin Line Between Love and Hate” are other highlights.
I still play this collection regularly on our iPod in the car, and on our computer at home. Every time I listen to songs from it, it gives me chills. It’s that good.
Oh, weird thing: if you’re looking for at Rhino, they don’t sell it, but I’m sure if you surf the Net, you can find it. Whatever the cost, it’s worth the purchase.
And now through the magic of YouTube, I bring you a few of these great artists — well, in one case, not exactly, but hey, it’s still classic:
Title: Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Grace
Atlantic Rhythm & Blues: 1947-1974 Box Set
