Out of This World: A Journey of Healing

Rating:
Summary: Swander is a wonder
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Rambling, self-absorbed & poorly written.
Review: My copy of this book is titled "Out Of This World: A Woman's Life Among The Amish", NOT "Out Of This World: A Journey Of Healing". I was disappointed. I was expecting a cultural anthropology of an "English" woman's experiences living in a primarily Amish neighborhood. True, there was some of that in the book. But it was mostly a rambling, self-absorbed personal memoir. The author was writing about her trials in coming to terms with her Environmental Illness. By the end of the book, I was thoroughly bored with her hypnotherapy sessions, her dreams about eating, the many frog legs she actually ate (including details on their capture and slaughter) and exactly how she chewed her yucca. In addition to not being the type of book I was expecting, it appeared to be written in more or less a "stream of consciousness" style, with no logical organization or chronology. In other words, I didn't particularly enjoy the book and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.