Life & Death & Giants

 At least for the length of this novel, I’ve abandoned our usual murder mystery, thriller, and espionage genres. Life & Death & Giants by Ron Rindo is just great literature. This is a story about an Amish community in Wisconsin and their interactions with people that live outside their community, typically referred to by them as the English. There is a very large Amish community in northern Indiana where I grew up, and I’ve visited the larger Amish community in Pennsylvania. My parents sometimes hired Amish women to help clean our house and we often visited an organic fruit and vegetable stand to buy food for the house. The quality of their sweet corn is something I can never forget. Our interactions with them were always curious, honest and wholesome. 

I learned more about the severe and unforgiving image of God that drives the organization of their lives, and the danger that “English” lives present to their way of thinking. Although generally withdrawn into their own community and avoidant of significant interactions with the English, some interactions are inevitable. The interactions among the Amish community itself is beautifully portrayed.

 

In this story a huge baby boy is born to an Amish woman who was excommunicated because her pregnancy did not arise from a marriage. That is a severe punishment that challenged her own ability to survive. Fortunately, she found an English woman who helped her. The boy, surely suffering from acromegaly (a pituitary gland tumor) although that was not specified by the author, was huge at birth, and he just kept getting bigger eventually becoming over 8 feet tall and weighing nearly 600 pounds (all muscle). He was a sensitive and well-loved man who grew up on the periphery of the Amish community and he became a sensation when he accepted a football scholarship to the University of Wisconsin where he became a once-in-a-lifetime star until he lost his leg as the result of a football injury. His exposure to the English world led him away from the Amish, and he actually became a sensation in the sports world when he agreed to become a one-legged professional wrestler. From my perspective, it was a most creative idea.

 

The quality of Rindo’s writing was wonderful. The plot unfolded in a carefully planned manner, and this reader became fascinated with the Amish and non-Amish characters. These were complicated people, bot the Amish and English. I needed to know how Rindo would bring the various subplots of love, struggle, angst, and death to a meaningful conclusion. He succeeded in all regards.

 

I’ll be returning to my usual genre in the immediate future, but this book is surely one of the best stories that I read this year.