Not So Simple: My Adventures Among the Amish, Mennonites, Shakers, and Other Plain People

For more than thirty years, Kevin Williams has been chasing the Amish — and himself. What began as a high school English paper became a lifelong obsession that took him from the one-room schoolhouses of Adams County to the last Shaker community in Maine, from the Swiss Amish yodelers of Indiana to the Old Order Mennonites of Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. Along the way he launched a syndicated newspaper column written by an actual Amish woman, built and lost an Amish pie empire, and spent decades searching for something he couldn't quite name. Not So Simple is funny, self-deprecating, and deeply reported — unlike any book written about Plain culture. It doesn't romanticize the Amish. It simply follows one man's lifelong attempt to understand them, and what that attempt reveals about the rest of us. Kevin Williams is the editor of The Amish Cook syndicated newspaper column and founder of Amish365.com. His journalism has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and CNBC. He is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist. BONUS RECIPE SECTION: The book ends with a special appendix of the editor's most sentimental and favorite recipes from Amish country. Read the book and finish it off with some oatmeal pie and other favorites!