Out of This World

A Journey of Healing

Mary Swander author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:University of Iowa Press

Published:1st Apr '08

Should be back in stock very soon

Out of This World cover

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 the largest Amish community west of the Mississippi. In this rich and engaging memoir, which follows the course of a farmer's year, she writes from the well-named Fairview School to share the radical transformation of her life.From her perch in rural Kalona, Iowa, Swander discovers new strength and self-reliance along with a community of hardworking and hospitable neighbors. Raising goats and poultry, participating in barn raisings and auctions, protecting her garden from a plague of grasshoppers, creating a living creche at Christmastime, all the while laughing at her attempts to wrestle with the pioneer challenges of midwestern winters and summers, she explores what it means to be a lone physical and spiritual homesteader at the end of the twentieth century.

Living in an Amish community, tied to the land and the seasons, Swander came to find balance and reawakened to a life of simplicity. - Chicago Tribune ""Out of This World flies on the strength of Swander's perceptions as a naturalist and on the drama of her challenges as a survivor of a truly otherworldly disease."" - Entertainment Weekly

ISBN: 9781587296376

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 290g

288 pages