Susan L. Trollinger. Selling the Amish: e Tourism of Nostalgia. Young Center Books in Anabaptists and Pietist Studies Series. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. xxii + 193 pp. $50.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4214- 0419-6. Reviewed by Caroline Brock (University of Missouri) Published on H-TGS (June, 2014) Commissioned by Josh Brown Susan Trollinger, an English professor from the Uni- versity of Dayton in Ohio, covers many Amish Country themes that reveal much about tourists and their ideas of the Amish in her book Selling the Amish: e Tourism of Nostalgia. She argues that three Amish tourist towns in Ohio (Walnut Creek, Berlin, and Sugarcreek) are de- signed around narratives that have meaning for tourists. Trollinger makes the book accessible to a general audi- ence by writing both as a tourist and as an academic. As a scholar, she writes from a visual rhetoric perspective, which stresses that images can create meaning and/or present arguments for the observer. Although the majority of the book is about the tourist sector, the book presents essential background on the Amish as well. Trollinger begins her work by providing a well-wrien condensed history that depicts the Amish as originating from a radical branch of the Protestant Refor- mation. ese Anabaptists wanted to demonstrate God’s kingdom by disentangling the church from politics, and in turn to separate their religious lives from citizenship. is basic knowledge is essential to understanding the myths of Amish tourism. Trollinger argues that the Amish Country tourist industry cannot fully and accurately depict the Amish lifestyle partly because the Amish want to live apart from mainstream society in an effort to maintain a faith life centered in their family and community. is may be in part why the tourist industry convinces tourists that they are strangers in a strange land and that they need a guide. is approach places the Amish in the back- ground which has the benefit of protecting them from tourists; they do not want tourism to affect their simple lifestyle. e overarching theme of Trollinger’s book is that the tourist sector creates certain visual images about the Amish in the way that shopping and eating establish- ments are designed and decorated. Trollinger demon- strates how these themes are centered on fundamental challenges with the tourists rather than an in-depth and accurate view of the Amish. Some of the fundamental challenges of tourists include their relationship to time, gender, and technology, as will be summarized more in this review. One of the main objectives of Amish Country tourism, according to Trollinger, is to convince tourists that being in Amish Country will ease their anxieties about modern American life. e tourist industry tai- lors messages to visitors, most of whom are white, mid- dle class, and middle aged to retired, generally from areas surrounding the three major Amish tourist locations that represent the American Heartland: Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. e tourist sector provides visitors with the comforts of modern American life through shopping and eating establishments. e tourist industry also uses the Amish to depict images of what a more positive fu- ture would be like, where families are unified and life is simpler, slower, and more relaxed. According to Trollinger, time and gender are major themes of Walnut Creek’s tourist sector. As she de- scribes, Walnut Creek’s tourist industry provides a dif- ferent conception of time and gender than most Ameri- cans have today. Tourist establishments show the beauty of Victorian-style buildings, which point to a “beer” era when people, women in particular, had time to engage in maintaining indoor beauty. e Amish are interwoven into this visual rhetoric; tourist venues seek to present the Amish as living harmoniously, with beer manage- ment of time, domestic beautification, and distinct gender roles. Trollinger cites outside research to illustrate the importance of these themes. For example, she draws on what John P. Robinson and Geoffrey Godbey call a “time famine,” meaning that modern people are working more and relaxing less.[1] At Walnut Creek, Trollinger argues, the goal is to make tourists feel like they have plenty of 1