This book is wonderful reading for anyone in the healing professions. It offers insight into aspects of healing one probably has not considered. I offered it to my mother, who has had orthopedic problems since childhood. I was certain she would find it interesting. However, she said the reading was "too difficult".

I found this book to be not only entertaining, but informative. It is a tour of the midwest and its vegetable gardners. Within the authors' investigation of the various gardens he finds are slices of each gardner's life and their views on the world. Each personality is shown through the garden, from a man who live in a shack and swears to letting his vegetable vines ramble wildly, to an older man who drives from his home to his plot with percise neat rows. It is also a nice compilation of gardening tips that read like a conversation with an old-timer. While reading you can almost picture these people, sitting before you and pointing out the potato bugs on the leaf, or letting the soil fall through their fingers, harvesting tomatoes, ect . . . I recommend this book because it shows pretty much why we are drawn to plant our own crops and watch them grow.

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.

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.