There are Little Libraries all over Brooklyn these days, and, also fewer books abandoned on the street. My latest find is an early career John Le Carre, but the previous one was Lisa Marie Stahl's My Hutterite Life. I chose it because I knew nothing about them or where they lived.
The Hutterites came to the northern U.S. and southern Canada from Germany by way of Russia. They are somewhat like the Amish in their rules about dress and adult baptism, but they don't eschew all modern technology. In 2003 when this was first published, Lisa Marie Stahl had decided to give up writing her newspaper column in he Great Falls Tribune, 'On the Colony,' because she married. This meant that she had to move to her husband's colony after the wedding.
One fascinating thing to me was the amount of cooperation among the colonists. All cooking is communal, all meals are eaten with everyone present. All the men run the farm. Their church services consist mainly of old sermons read aloud in German. Children study German at the colony's school, which goes to the 8th grade. Stahl writes that all the adult vote in local and national elections but that they don't get involved in politics (huh).
Since this is Stahl's personal chronicle of her life "on the colony" there is no third party critical writing. She does not question her life as it is (why do men make most decisions? what would attending high school be like?). This is a collection of newspaper columns explaining life on the colony, not examining it. For me, that made the material more interesting. I would not want to live there, but I enjoyed reading about it.
