Steven Nolt, author of several books on the Amish, has written a brilliant concise introduction with his latest, The Amish: An Introduction. Working through nine succinct chapters, this slim volume and its highly accessible and eminently enjoyable prose takes the reader through the basics of the faith and culture of the Amish people in the United States. Serving as a much-needed antidote to the, in recent years, proliferation of “reality television” shows premised on Amish life, typically exploiting the “fish-out-of-water” trope by placing the Amish in a large city or through an extravagant caricature of Rumspringa and the “youth-gone-wild” narrative.

Although The Amish is a primer on its subject, Nolt covers an impressive range of topics clearly, simply, and with sophistication. The opening vignette is of an upcoming school meeting in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, where those attending were reminded to use correct spelling for the GPS. This little story seems to, on a cursory level, contradict what is popularly known of the Amish: they are antimodern and anti-technology, so why are some using GPS? In framing the book this way, Nolt takes us through numerous complex issues, demonstrating that much of what is commonly known is incomplete. This story illustrates that for a people without driver's licenses and cars but hire others to drive them on long trips—people who have GPS—knowledge of modern technology is not a stretch. What is happening here, and throughout the book, supports Nolt's central theme: the Amish “interact with the wider world by bargaining with modernity” (2). They live in a modern world on their terms which are often reinforced by how the surrounding society treats and accommodates them (8).

Opening the first chapter with a list of eight myths about the Amish is both interesting and helpful. Although a book framed as debunking myths and stereotypes can come off as scolding or defensive, Nolt is neither. For example, the tourism trope of “visit Amish country” is accurate in the sense that there are areas where Amish live in concentrated numbers, but it is inaccurate in the image of a bounded space—there are no Amish reserves. (10–11) By the end of the second chapter, the reader has been given helpful definition of terms, a precis of Amish diversity and history reaching to their roots in the sixteenth-century Reformation. Furthermore, the ubiquitous image of the Amish horse-and-buggy transportation is helpfully explained as resulting in a 1910 decision to reject the car—having become a status symbol in society. The deliberate choice in favor of a slower mode was made to support family and community relations, whereas the automobile seemingly heightened individualism. In fact, by their choices, the Amish offer a quiet critique of modernity, where community is primary over the individual, where tradition trumps “new and improved,” and where rational efficiency gives way to a designed slower pace.

Understanding how much that critical eye toward modernity animates Amish religious belief and culture is foreign to modern America, Nolt adroitly takes us through explanations of Amish “soft patriarchy,” the theological key of “self-surrender,” and anti-competitiveness with sophisticated and affectionate explanations. Each chapter is brief with hardly a wasted word and Nolt provides a clinic on writing economy without losing flavor. The chapter on Rumspringa stands out for its concise treatment of Amish sexual mores, courtship, marriage, and family with a focus on adolescence and this time in a young person's life that has captured the imagination (sometimes puerile) of the larger world. Explaining the role of baptism, church membership, and how this period of one's life is not a moral “time out” but one of significant decision making, friendship formation, and adult considerations. While some certainly take this season as one of dissipation, Nolt presents this as hardly the norm; in fact, Rumspringa has more to do with volleyball than degeneracy.

Nolt concludes with a chapter on Amish images in American culture, paying attention to the mid-1980s film, Witness. The film brings up many issues regarding the representation of minority groups in film (especially when neither consulted nor included) but also how nonchalant most Amish were to the enterprise. In so doing, and in the film itself, the Amish provide a stark and unsettling option for living in modern America, while at the same time presenting a vision of thriving in a modern, fast, technological, individualistic, and materialist world by negotiating on their terms a mostly different way. There is much to commend in this lean book, and I would recommend it to anyone wishing to learn of the Amish for the first time and for anyone taking a vacation trip to Amish country. Of all the many strengths of this book, I think the vital one is the underlying theme of Amish agency and the demonstration that they are not an eighteenth-century time-capsule; rather, the Amish are vibrant, dynamic, evolving, and deliberate.