Not So Simple

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, nearly starred in a reality television show, and spent decades searching for something he couldn't quite name.

Not So Simple is the memoir of a Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist who spent thirty years as an outsider looking in - at the Amish, at the Mennonites, at the Shakers, and ultimately at himself. It is a book about simplicity, failure, faith, and the stubborn human need to connect with something more certain than the world we have built.

Funny, self-deprecating, and deeply reported, Not So Simple is unlike any book written about Plain culture. It doesn't romanticize the Amish or explain them. 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, founder of Amish365.com, and a Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and CNBC. He lives in Germantown, Ohio.