Book Reviews

Ann Hostetler, Empty Room with Light. Telford, Penn.: DreamSeeker Books, 2002. Pp. 100. ($12.05 - paperback) ISBN 1-931038-10-4

Ann Hostetler's first collection of poems is divided into five sections: Book I- Impressions; II- Family Gallery; III-Life Studies; IV-Exhibitions; V-En Plein Air. Throughout, it is Hostetler's method to handle the things of the world, to pick them up and notice them, the things which help us to know we live in this world. Her poetic line is rapid, almost breathless, never scripted or overworked. There is a freshness for the reader in what gets notice; there is a vantage point that beckons. There is a racing mind in a busy world. The poems are based in the "real"-the seeing eye turning on itself frequently, recognizing personal limitations, oftentimes self-deprecatory, at times piqued by the guilt of recognition in a life which swarms. Frequently, the poetic voice is simply not up to it, and admits that life is too much with her.

The collection is rich with poems of memory, as are most first collections. Here, poems of memory are turned on Amish ancestors, lyric moments of mother and father-love, poems which honor forgotten female ancestors, clearly a special concern for Hostetler. Especially in the first book, "Impressions," there are childhood and coming-of-age references; in "Easter Coat," the poet's mother celebrates her becoming a woman with the making of a coat from the softest wool ever, in silvery olive, peach and ivory plaid, the sophisticated colors of womanhood. But it is a place the young woman cannot yet inhabit, standing in line in school in her dotted-swiss hand-me-down, longing for spring. That is the consistent voice of these poems: intense longing, often for the ethereal, for escape. One beautiful moment of escape occurs in one of my favorite poems, "Marriage, with Children," which closes with a beautiful image of husband steeling weary wife: "I close my eyes, feel our marriage falling/like a loose, baggy net about us. Then your thumbs press/against my spine./ I ease into your touch,/a moment's elasticity./As your fingers work the muscles/of my back, our life draws taut again,/a web hung rich with glittering complexity,/unimagined in our youthful love."

Most of the poems in this book are glimpses, defining moments of clarification in the hubbub of a professional woman's juggling of family life and professional calling, and they are rife with that tension. Frequently, they are also rife with the self-accusations that know of a different way women once lived (Amish ancestors, quieter women). But they are clear-eyed, aware of the choices made by a contemporary woman, an intellectual, an artist, a writer. And they also document the rewards. Because of the breathless pace of the poems, and because there is so much of the "stuff of life," in this collection, I felt greatly relieved and grateful for some of the quiet poems, the introspective poems with spare line and reference, like "Insomnia" in which the writer's voice reveals "an empty space, a square/of light or air, thin air,/into which for years/I've feared to fall." A stark, compelling image follows: "I am a chocolate rabbit,/ a ceramic doll like the one I chose for my seventh/birthday, her limbs held to her fragile body/ by elastic strings crisscrossed through her vacant core." This powerful image of "woman used up"--the woman who has nothing more to give, is familiar but fresh. I long for more of these kinds of images in Hostetler's poems.

This first collection documents, catalogues, chronicles. In the end, the best poems turn to image. I have a feeling subsequent collections will haunt with images like the poignant one that closes the book in "Journey," again, an image of disappearance, but here through lovemaking, and disappearance from the "world too much with us" into a nothingness that can explore or become: "You walk through me over/and over as I journey through you/to familiar landscapes/I have never seen before."

Raylene Hinz-Penner
Topeka, Kansas

June Alliman Yoder, ed., The Work Is Thine, O Christ: In Honor of Erland Waltner. Elkhart, IN: Institute of Mennonite Studies, 2002. Pp. 148. ISBN 0-936273-33-X

It is fitting that the Institute of Mennonite Studies at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary last year (2002) published a tribute to Erland Waltner. Perhaps slightly awkwardly entitled The Work is Thine, O Christ: In Honor of Erland Waltner, the book is edited by associate professor of communication and preaching June Alliman Yoder, and contains three main parts: Erland Waltner: His Life, His Work, His Influence. This volume is enhanced by about ten pages of photographs.

In the first section, Bethel College professor of history James Juhnke sketches Waltner's early years from his youth on a farm near Freeman, South Dakota, through his college and graduate education, early pastorates, and teaching at Bethel College from 1949 until his appointment as president of Mennonite Biblical Seminary in 1957.

In a second chapter of this first section, C. J. Dyck, professor emeritus of Anabaptist-Mennonite studies at AMBS, takes up the story of Waltner's 21 years of the presidency of MBS until his retirement in 1978. He explains the circumstances of the seminary's relocation from Chicago to Elkhart in 1957, when the seminary exchanged its association with the Church of the Brethren seminary in Chicago for an association with Goshen Biblical Seminary. Dyck also touches upon Waltner's handling of the student turbulence of the late '60s and early '70s and chronicles the administrative transitions from two cooperating seminaries to one integrated theological school.

Ross Bender, former dean of AMBS and former president of Mennonite World Conference, reports Waltner's involvement in that Mennonite world body, beginning with an address Waltner gave to MWC in 1948 and continuing through Waltner's ten-year presidency of MWC from Kitchener, Ontario, in 1962 to Curitiba, Brazil, in 1972.

In a fourth chapter, retired Goshen physician Willard Krabill recognizes Erland Waltner's contribution as Executive Secretary of the Mennonite Medical Association from 1979 to 1992, after Waltner's retirement from the presidency of MBS.

In the last chapter on Waltner: His Life, Nina Bartelt Lanctot, associate minister of Belmont Mennonite Church in Elkhart, expresses appreciation for Waltner's work as a spiritual counselor in nonpublic settings, mostly since his retirement. Living just across Benham Avenue from the seminary, Waltner continues to keep an office at the seminary and continues his interest and support of the cause of ministerial education and church life to which he has given so many years.

The second section of this book, Waltner: His Work, consists of 11 selections from Waltner's pen, beginning with a sermon he preached as pastor of Bethel Mennonite Church, Mountain Lake, Minnesota, right after Pearl Harbor in 1941. This section also includes Waltner's inaugural address as president of MBS in 1958, an excerpt from his commentary upon First Peter in the Believers Church Commentary series (published in 1999), and several 2001 columns in the Mennonite Health Journal. Waltner himself likely chose these selections, I would guess.

One is surprised at the long gap between the inaugural address of 1958 and a paper at a Notre Dame workshop on Pastoral Care in 1985, seven years after Waltner's retirement. The inaugural address declares an intention to maintain a balance between academics and spirituality. Waltner's vision was for seminary education to produce a graduate who would be both "saint and scholar." Well said. But why no other addresses from the rest of this era of Waltner's presidency of MBS, the height of his career? These years are the middle third of a sixty-year career as pastor, teacher, and administrator.

The third section of this book is headed Waltner: His Influence. But it reflects that influence only in a most indirect fashion, because the ten chapters in this section are almost all sermons by different people from various times and places. In this respect they resemble the content of the typical Festschrift, in which selected scholars "do their own thing," each producing a short monograph on one of his or her own areas of interest.

The choice of contributors to this section is not especially clear or logical. The writers are all fine people, and one would expect pieces from AMBS faculty and administrators who know Waltner and whose bylines appear here: Jake Elias, Janeen Bertsche Johnson, and June Alliman Yoder. One is also not surprised to see sermons from James Schrag, Mesach Krisetya, current president of Mennonite World Conference, Peter Dyck, and Rose Waltner Graber, Erland's daughter.

But why no other representatives of the AMBS faculty who have had a long association with Waltner? Granted, many of them are deceased: Howard Charles, Jake Enz, Marlin Miller, Gertrude Roten. Yet I would have expected something from Leland Harder or Millard Lind or Willard Swartley. And why not tributes to Waltner? Coming to the Rose Waltner Graber contribution, the last piece in section 3, I was at last expecting something from his daughter about Erland Waltner the father and family man, something more personal than another sermon.

Erland Waltner himself is given the privilege of an epilogue, and his comments there explain the title of the book. For many years he has loved the hymn "The Work is Thine, O Christ." The ideals articulated in that hymn have guided Waltner and reassured him in times when he encountered pressures and conflicts in his administrative work. That is no doubt the reason he gained the confidence of people who were willing to entrust him with the tasks of pastor, college teacher, conference moderator, seminary president, Mennonite World Conference President, and Mennonite Medical Association Executive Secretary. His contribution of over sixty years to the Mennonite church merits our profound thanks.

Marlin Jeschke

James O. Lehman, Mennonite Tent Revivals: Howard Hammer and Myron Augsburger, 1952-1962. Kitchener, Ont.: Pandora Press, 2002. Pp. 318. ($27.00 - paperback) ISBN I-894710-22-3

In the early 1980s several of us Mennonite scholars found ourselves quite at odds with erstwhile tent revivalist George Brunk II; so we met personally with him to try some reconciliation. As we did, we all told how that one way or another we too had been part of the Brunk tent campaigns. My story was that after a massive campaign at Goshen, Indiana in 1952, when I was an eighteen-year-old truck driver whose chauffeur's license was scarcely dry, I had driven a local supporter's truck from Goshen, Indiana to Harrisonburg, Virginia to haul some of the chairs and canvas that overflowed from the Brunk Brothers' trailers. Had the story been relevant, I could also have told him that three years later an organization called "Christian Laymen's Tent Evangelism, Inc." (CLTE) had brought Myron Augsburger and a tent to Goshen-and that I had climbed up onto CLTE's GMC semi-tractor to look at the impressively large generator installed in place of the passenger seat to power the tent's lights and equipment. Someone of the CLTE staff had explained just how the generator was connected to the tractor's drive line. (From reading Lehman's book, I suppose the explainer was Paul Neuenschwander.)

Our point with Brother Brunk was how deeply the mass tent revivals had affected us personally. A great many Mennonites, Amish, and others who were at least eight years old in 1950 could give the same testimony. Although North American Mennonites' intense affair with tent revivals heated up and cooled rapidly in the 1950s and 1960s, it certainly was historic. We need more literature on it, both factual and analytical. James Lehman's book is about campaigns sponsored by CLTE, in 1958 renamed more broadly the "Christian Laymen's Evangelistic Association" (CLEA). The public faces of the CLTE/CLEA campaigns were mainly two gifted preachers, Howard Hammer and Myron Augsburger. From Lehman's account, certain lay leaders in eastern Ohio who formed and ran CLTE, CLEA, and their logistics seem almost as crucial.

For the CLTE/CLEA campaigns, whose years were 1952 to 1962, Lehman has at least given us the facts. Up to now Lehman's forte has been a species of local history, namely very thorough congregational histories; and although his tent-revival story moves back and forth across North America, as far west as Salem, Oregon and as far east as Quakertown, Pennsylvania, much in this history is still local. Very often, and at some length, the book focuses on the workings of the CLTE/CLEA organization and the people who ran it. Even more, Lehman delivered large parts of his account locality-by-locality, campaign-by-campaign (usually about five campaigns each summer). As he did, he recorded in great detail just who was doing what-marshaling support, raising the tent, leading the singing, and the rest. Sometimes the details get tedious, especially when the book moves through CLTE or CLEA board meetings almost report by report, official minute by official minute. Other details become quite dramatic-for instance, those times when summer windstorms flattened tents at just the wrong moments or, for that matter, the impressive numbers of persons who made public promises to follow Christ, either as first decisions or as recommitments. Surely the local-history approach has much merit. Many readers will connect, the way I have, by recalling their own involvements in this or that campaign. All will appreciate that Lehman has done what is most basic: careful research, and delivery of solid facts. He has written real history, not something pompous and "too clever by half."

At key points Lehman did interrupt his flow of details to deal with wider issues. His account acquaints readers well with Howard Hammer and Myron Augsburger. In the case of Hammer and his family Lehman even stopped the tent-evangelism story long enough to follow them, after their time with CLTE, to free-lance mission work in Brazil. The Hammers' story was full of tragedy, and was so even before the evangelist-turned-missionary died violently in South America. (Lehman leaves open the possibility that Hammer's death, which occurred along with that of a young woman, was a case of murders by a third party rather than murder-suicide as commonly supposed.) Just as the last CLTE campaign of 1953 closed, a high-school-age son of the Hammers died. Thereafter the gifted, winsome, and successful evangelist seemed to lose interest and confidence in what he was doing. And as if larger forces really were against him, the next year, during the final campaign of his time as a tent revivalist, near-hurricane-strength winds hit Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, took the tent down, and all but destroyed it. By contrast the story of Myron Augsburger is full of good fortune: even greater gifts, growing wisdom, broadening vision, widening opportunities, and ample appreciation from both Mennonites and others. For some readers, however, the true hero may be Paul Neuenschwander. A Kidron, Ohio electrician who was only about 31 when CLTE started, he seems always, at least in the formative years, to have supervised the tent-raisings, wired up the lights, made the public address systems work, taken the photos that effectively captured the mass attendance, and kept the trucks running. Eventually Neuenschwander turned day-to-day operations over to others, yet he still seems to have been there whenever a practical problem left everyone else stumped. Can the Kingdom of Heaven ever come without such folks?

Broad issues do emerge. A whole chapter plus some smaller sections interrupt the campaign story to recount at least a little of the MC Mennonites' growing discussion of the deeper issues. Revivalism or evangelism? (I.e., preach to invigorate the faith of Mennonites themselves, or mainly to win others?) Mennonite-run campaigns, or broader, interdenominational ones? Tents pitched on Mennonite fields, or urban auditoriums? Even as he recounted details, Lehman wove in some larger themes. For instance, he developed a point that Augsburger brought a new professionalism to the tent-revival movement. And he told how the same evangelist shifted gradually from the original Mennonite pattern to campaigns that were interdenominational and community- or city-wide, much more on the Billy Graham model.

Sometimes Lehman addressed key questions which he could scarcely begin to answer. For instance, he made some attempt to discuss how the movement's rapid rise and fall may have related to changes in America's culture, its media, and its wave of religiosity in the 1950s; but he hardly more than introduced such issues. The same is true of Mennonites' headlong immersion into that culture. As for the sharpest complaints that critics have made against the revivalists, such as their manipulating people in ways that have victimized children or the spiritually and psychologically insecure, Lehman sometimes alluded to such charges but he scarcely went farther. He did, however, give the strong impression that neither the Hammer nor the Augsburger campaigns operated so crudely. The standard stereotype of tent revivals hardly includes the singing of Handel's "Hallelujah Chorus"; but that did happen at least once, in 1961, on the final night of a campaign at St. Catherine, Ontario!

Pandora Press should have demanded or produced a far better index: inclusions are erratic, and many entries have long strings of numbers without the sub-entries and cross-references that make an index so much more useful. (Apparently computer-generation is the bane of good indexing.) The book's editing has the occasional lapse. Too many of the photos are grainy, even though they do greatly enhance the text. Yet overall the layout, editing, and production are acceptably competent. And one certainly must applaud the attempt to make this book available at about the price of dinner for two at a decent but moderate restaurant. Once again, James O. Lehman has given us a very informative and worthwhile book.

Theron F. Schlabach
Professor of History
Goshen College

Lawrence Klippenstein and Jacob Dick, Mennonite Alternative Service in Russia: The Story of Abram Dück and His Colleagues, 1911-1917. Kitchener: Pandora Press; Scottdale: Herald Press, 2002. Pp. 163 ($17- paperback) ISBN 1-894710-21-5

This small book has a complex structure. At its center is a series of photographs of Mennonites serving in the Forestry and related units before World War One and later on the hospital trains during the War, especially on the Turkish front in Central Asia. These come mainly from the collection of Abram Dück, the father of the co-author Jacob Dick, and his friends and relatives. The photographs are connected to the memoirs of one of the group, Johann Mathies, who served both in the Forestry Service and on the trains with Abram Dück. Jacob Dick links his account with a narrative of his own and supplies an epilogue concerned with his own journey to Georgia in 2002 where he searched out and discovered some of the sites in the photographs. Finally the book is properly contextualized with an introductory essay on "Mennonites and Military Service in Russia" written by Lawrence Klippenstein who wrote his PhD thesis on alternative service in Russia and the Soviet Union and is a recognized expert on this subject.

Although complex, the book is easy to read and provides a fascinating insight into the different forms of Mennonite alternative service. Klippenstein's introduction sets the scene well. Dick then takes the reader from the pre-war forest camp at Azov and on into war service in European Russia and then on the Asian front. Details of camp life are linked to the photographs depicting the working conditions, camp life, initiation rituals for recruits, and music groups, picnics etc.. Mathies's account, obviously written long after the events he describes (although Dick mentions a diary), has a certain charm in itself. It is somewhat typical of many such accounts with its sudden jumps from topic to topic and reflective asides all delivered in a matter-of-fact manner. Many interesting points are not developed or clarified although the authors have included a set of useful maps that assist in tracking the movements of Dück and Mathies.

The photographs, a mixture of personal snaps of individuals, groups, work units, and postcards of places, are reasonably well reproduced given the format and price of the book. But they are dark and lack the detail and clarity that perhaps they deserve. And while the interesting reverse comments on many of the pictures are included, there is little consideration of the style and purpose of the photographs. While many are of groups involved in work-somewhat artificially posed no doubt to cope with the speed of the camera lens-others are more formal. These include groups no doubt on high days and holidays posing together, including a brass band complete with special uniforms. Others consist of studio shots with groups or individuals sitting or standing in front of improbable landscape backcloths occasionally leaning on chairs or oddly decorated plinths. A series of studio shots show individuals squashed in a fake rock cavern complete with stalactites!

What was the purpose of such photography? And what part did it play in Mennonite life? From the surviving comments on the reverse of some, the pictures were obviously intended for friends and relatives back home in the Mennonite settlements. Others were taken by men serving in the same units, most likely at a time when they were due to return home or join another unit, and presented as gifts for each other. The comments on the reverse indicate these are gifts from friends and greetings are accompanied by the home address of the gift-giver.

The photographs also reveal the militarization of Mennonite men, irrespective of the fact that they were serving in "alternative" units outside military control. This process began in the camps with the uniforms, drill, and discipline but the photographs hint that this tendency increased once the men volunteered for hospital service. The uniforms then become more militaristic and more importantly are worn with more dash than in the camps. Not only were Mennonites now beyond the remote world of the forestry camps, but during the war most young men wore military uniforms, indicating they were serving their motherland. Of particular interest is the sporting of moustaches-full and handsome with the occasional upward twist at the ends. In fact, so many of the men are dressed in identical uniforms and sport the same style of moustache that in some pictures they look almost identical. Uniformity has taken over in more than just dress!

Yet there are indications that Mennonites attempted to remain separate from the militarization of society, even during the war. Their epaulettes carried crosses as did their hat insignia, clearly indicating their hospital roles and connection with civil, not military, units. And Mathies records an interesting episode when an elderly general takes control of a train and begins to treat the men like army recruits, ordering that they cut their hair short and observe military discipline. Some Mennonites resist and are arrested. Mathies records that after the intervention of a nursing sister of noble descent the general revokes his orders and apologizes once he realizes that the Mennonite orderlies are "intelligent people." This reveals a great deal about military life, the attitudes of officers to peasant soldiers, and the anomalous place of Mennonites in Russian society.

There are a few inconsistencies and errors. The spelling of place names is inconsistent Khortitza/Chortitza (it should be Khortitsa anyway), Azov/Asov, Ekaterinoslav/Jekaterinoslav (or Jekaterinoslaw? ), Sagradovka (Sagradowka/Zagradovka) etc. The picture on p. 71 dated 1912 is obviously from 1917 and belongs to s series of portraits taken on the same day (see p. 111). Otherwise this is a very interesting addition to the limited literature on alternative service in Russia and raises a number of interesting questions which require further interpretation and analysis.

Dr. James Urry
Anthropology, School of Social & Cultural Studies
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand