The Amish and the Media is a provocative, well-written and well-analyzed volume that explores the dialectical relationship between the American media and the Amish. The editors have done an excellent job assembling a fine group of scholars, each of whom draws on current media theory to explore how the media, the Amish, and American consumers all participate in the process of mediation and commodification, “the process of creating and recreating meaning to be shared” (12). The authors are concerned not so much with detailing a history of Amish in America as they are exploring what the anthropologists James Clifford and George Marcus have famously coined “the politics of representation” (Writing Culture [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986]). That is, how have the American media portrayed the Amish and what do these representations tell us about ourselves and what we want to see and consume? And, turning to the Amish, how do the Amish wish to be portrayed and how do they represent themselves to us? As the authors all point out, the Amish themselves exhibit agency—they are participants in mediation and are not merely acted upon. The authors' key concerns and questions have to do with issues of identity: just exactly what identities are being created and sustained in the mediation process (14)? What is the intention of the producers of films and documentaries on the Amish? What do poets writing about the Amish hope to express? What do tourists who visit Amish country and Amish-themed parks hope to get out of the experience? And where do the Amish fit into all of this mediation? Where is their voice? The authors address these questions with care and with a thoughtfulness that drew this reviewer in and made me care about the issues raised in the volume. The Amish and the Media is a highly readable, engaging book that crosses disciplinary boundaries and should appeal to scholars in the fields of communication studies and sociology as much as it will to scholars who study religion in North America.

The book consists of an introduction and conclusion written by Zimmerman Umble and Weaver-Zercher and ten chapters written by a wide range of scholars in film studies, media studies, English, women's studies, religious studies, and history. The authors in part 1 (Crystal Downing, Dirk Eitzen, Julia Spicher Kasdorf, Weaver-Zercher, and Susan Bieseker) explore the moods and motivations of those “English”—non-Amish men and women—who produce films, write poetry, and publish nonfiction accounts of their experiences with the Amish. They also examine the motivations behind tourism to Amish places and offer some important insights. What is more interesting than looking at the historical accuracy of these accounts, these authors collectively argue, is how the Amish are represented and what these representations tell us about ourselves and how we domesticate the Amish. In many ways, the authors in part 1 implicitly draw on Weaver-Zercher's excellent scholarship demonstrated in The Amish in the American Imagination, in which he examines how the English represent the Amish and what those representations, desires, and mediations tell us about ourselves and what we want to be (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).

Downing's essay is especially intriguing as it offers a critical commentary on two feature films, Witness (1985) and For Richer or Poorer (1997), which are ostensibly about the Amish. Downing shows how these two films, especially Witness, hearken back to the Greek pastoral utopia of Arcadia and create idealized, pastoral fictions that we want to embody and emulate. The Amish perpetuate an American dream of idyllic agrarian harmony and “simple rural peace” that really is age-old fiction, as Downing deftly shows. Eitzen's, Weaver-Zercher's, and Biesecker's essays all play on the idealized other of the Amish and how non-Amish “English” mediate their idealized versions with how they see themselves—watered-down moral versions of the imagined morally and culturally superior Amish. The first of Eitzen's two essays explores how documentarians mediate their desire to promote a deeper understanding of Amish youth in the popular Devil's Playground (2002) with the ethical issues that surround representing a group that avoids worldly media. His second essay examines the not-always-competing interests of the ratings-focused UPN network and the Amish youth who signed up to have their rite of passage examined on the popular reality show Amish in the City (2004). The Amish youth, in other words, are active participants in the process of mediating identity, and they play a role in how they are othered by their non-Amish audience. Kasdorf's focus is how non-Amish poets have othered the Amish, and not always in positive ways, pointing to the fear some have of these white ethnics. Her analysis is intriguing, and she argues that poems of the Amish demonstrate Americans' “twin fears” of, first, history and tradition and, second, entrapment or enclosure within family and community (79). The essays that comprise part 1 are in conversation with one another as they are all interested in exploring non-Amish Americans' attraction to the Amish and what this attraction and process of othering the Amish can tell us about ourselves and our values, dreams, and desires.

The authors whose essays appear in part 2 examine Old Order Amish as media producers and consumers. Donald Kraybill, Steven N. Nolt, Karen Johnson-Weiner, Zimmerman Umble, and Weaver-Zercher all explore the delicate balance that members of Amish culture undertake when they represent themselves to the larger, “English” public. As Kraybill highlights, “Two fundamental values of Amish life wrap the cultural tarp tightly around their society: separatism and humility” (165). And those Amish who do speak to reporters and members of the media tend to be more progressive and not necessarily representative of the majority of community members (171). Those who do speak to media outlets face a great risk of censure and even excommunication if they do not show the proper humility and deference to community mores. As these authors demonstrate, the Amish who do work with the media control, to a large degree, the mechanisms of representation and the process of negotiation. Those Amish who are not careful and who fail to exercise caution must take the proper measures of displaying humility by confessing and denouncing their self-centered behavior (173–175).

As the authors of part 2 all emphasize, the Amish are deliberate and careful agents who aim to have a say in the process and politics of representation. Whether it relates to how they talk to reporters or how they represent their values and deep-seated theology in Amish-affiliated weeklies (Nolt) or in schoolbooks (Johnson-Weiner), or how they publicly respond to drug busts that involved Amish youth (Zimmerman Umble), Amish men and women are always alert participants in the process of mediation. They are, to invoke an oft-used phrase, “in the world but not of the world,” and they seek to maintain a balance between separatism and humility on one hand and the undeniable fact that they are ethnic minorities in a vast land on the other. The concluding essay, co-written by the editors, wraps up the volume by examining the 2006 Nickel Mines school shooting and how the Amish, by their radical act of forgiveness (to outsiders at least) changed the tone of the mediation and exhibited a profound agency that deeply influenced the up-to-then media-led discourse.

This is a finely crafted edited volume that should be easily adapted in undergraduate as well as graduate-level courses. The authors write with a knowledge and sensitivity to the topic that is refreshing and that scholars and students alike should appreciate.