GREAT POSSESSIONS: An Amish Farmer’s Journal ...

GREAT POSSESSIONS: An Amish Farmer’s Journal by David Kline (North Point Press: $9.95). This warm account of life on a 120-acre farm in Fredericksburg, Ohio, began as a series of columns in Family Life. The author emerges as a pious but never sanctimonious man who treats the land and the creatures that inhabit it with reverence. Reflecting on his life on that endangered institution, the family farm, Kline asks, “Is it a way of farming that preserves the soil, the water, the air, the wildlife, the families that work the land, and the surrounding communities? In other words, are we proper caretakers or stewards of God’s Creation?”--a rhetorical question for a man who postpones the threshing rather than risk harming the bobolinks that nest in his fields. Kline revels in the beauties of the seasons, the birds, the animals and the flowers, and graciously shares his joy with the reader.