Rumspringa: to be or not to be Amish Tom Shachtman This book is a fascinating look at a little-known Amish coming-of-age ritual, the rumspringa - the period of “running around” that begins for Amish youth at age sixteen. Through vivid portraits of teenagers in Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, Tom Shachtman offers an account of this aspect of Amish life as a mirror to the soul-searching and questing of adolescence generally. The trappings of the Amish way of life - the "plain" clothes and electricity-free farms - conceal a mystery: how the Amish manage to retain their young people and perpetuate their way of life for generation after generation. The key to this puzzle is the rumspringa, when Amish youth are allowed to live outside the bounds of their faith, experimenting with the larger world and its temptations: alcohol, premarital sex, telephones, drugs, wild parties, and higher education. By allowing such broad freedoms, their parents hope they will learn enough to help them make the most important decision of their lives - whether to be baptized in the Amish church and forever give up worldly ways, or to remain out in the world. In this searching book, based on his interviews and research for a documentary about the rumspringa, Shachtman captures young people and their parents as they work through a fateful decision, and gives us an original and deeply affecting portrait of the Amish as a whole.