Out of This World: A Woman's Life Among the Amish

by Mary Swander

Book Overview

When a life-threatening allergic illness demanded that she eat only organically grown food, writer and professor Mary Swander built a new life in a former one-room Iowa schoolhouse in the middle of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0670858080
• ISBN13: 9780670858088
• Release Date: July 1995
• Publisher: Viking Books
• Length: 276 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.8" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

Absorbing account of personal journey

Often in life we struggle with our own journeys -- not understood by the mainstream--but few of us have changed our lifestyles as dramatically as Swander. I found myself constantly amazed at the personal and physical endurance she showed in carving out a new way of life. It is a story of self-denial in the areas of food, companionship, and many of the luxuries we have come to think of as necessities. The simple lifestyle of her Amish neighbors served as a example to the author as she sought answers for healing both physically and spiritually. Her prose is poetic--making this a story you will want to read.

Helpful in its own way on a road to healing

I lived in the same general area as Swander describes although I know nothing about living among the Amish. I appreciated her comments about having to relearn eating again.

Swander is a wonder

Feeling in need of healing myself, I read "Out of This World," with delight. It's an Iowan's book, or a Midwesterner's, and it helps to live near an Amish community. Swander can depict the Amish people as individuals, because she interacts with them and respects their simplicity and spirituality. I especially enjoyed the description of her Christmas celebration and of her animals' lives. To me, she writes like E. B. White crossed with Annie Dillard--the domestic life interwoven with the natural, seamlessly.