Joe Mackall shares the story of his surprising friendship with a Swartzentruber Amish family trying to live a simple life in a complex world.
"Joe Mackall's Plain Secrets: An Outsider Among the Amish meets the biggest challenge of a book such as this by living up to his subtitle: Mackall is both outside and among in equal measure, and it's the most difficult terrain to occupy. Plain Secrets vibrates in that in-betweenness, in ways that only songs or poems usually can, and it does so in prose that's as clear as water. It's built the way the Amish build their barns -- everything here is plumb and level."-Diana Hume George, author of The Lonely Other: A Woman Watching America