The Boy in the Window: A Mennonite Memoir

Growing up as a Ragland boy meant a one-way street to nowhere—until the Mennonites moved to town.

Robert Ragland toiled every day on his family's Appalachian tobacco farm as a young boy. His father, an impoverished and illiterate sharecropper, spent his earnings on alcohol and beat his children and wife constantly.

And Robert couldn't take one more strike.
Meanwhile, Mennonite families had moved to town, providing food and comfort when Robert's mother broke her leg. Witnessing compassion from...