Review by Booklist Review
After a severe allergic reaction had left her with the symptoms of environmental illness (unable to tolerate the pollutants and food found in the modern world), Swander decided to change her lifestyle and move into a one-room Iowa schoolhouse on the outskirts of an Amish community. Her book is an account of that lifestyle change and the strength and self-sufficiency she developed as a result. Completely incapable of stomaching commercially grown food, Swander existed at first on a diet of roadkill, frog legs, and yucca and other exotic plants. Slowly, with the help of her Amish neighbors, she became proficient at growing her own organic fruits and vegetables, improving her health both physically and spiritually. The story of her illness and recovery is fascinating, but readers who are expecting an immersion into Amish culture will be disappointed. The references to the Amish are merely anecdotal; the true gist of this book is the reawakening of Swander's spirituality, brought about by her close association with her down-to-earth, no-frills neighbors. Although interesting for its portrayal of the hardship and determination of those choosing a more primitive lifestyle, the story, unfortunately, often gets bogged down in New-Age-type introspection. (Reviewed July 1995)0670858080Kathleen Hughes
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The medical condition described as ``environmental illness,'' severe allergies to most pollutants, was the catalyst that forced Swander, a poet from the Midwest, to seek an alternate lifestyle. Happily, she found it in an Amish settlement in Iowa, where she lives in a one-room country schoolhouse and grows ``my crops in a 20-by-40 plot just outside the door.'' A life of eloquent simplicity is celebrated in these pages; she travels the road back to health with humor and ingenuity, as, for example, her incorporation of frogs' legs into a spare diet. Swander's acknowledgment of her gifts-the comfort of farmyard company and the neighborly Amish who never fail her-parallels an inner journey of a solitary who finds a place called home. This poet's traverse of a farmer's year forms an inspirational memoir of a modern pioneer woman. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A sensitive but self-important memoir of an outsider's life in one of Iowa's Amish communities. Poet Swander makes her second foray into nonfiction (coauthor, Parsnips in the Snow, not reviewed, etc.) with this account of the hardships and rewards of living off the land when severe allergies to virtually all nonorganic food forced her into a one-room schoolhouse among an enduringly enigmatic group of simple folk. Depicting her life from childhood on, she offers many examples of her longstanding difficulties with food: falling asleep at the kitchen table when her mother demanded she sit there until she'd cleaned her plate, inexplicable rashes and sinus headaches when she tried to grow out of her picky eating habits as an adult, a diagnosis in her 20s of an intolerance to milk and eggs, and then, when her allergies worsened in her 30s, mistreatment by an allergist that almost killed her and left her unable to consume anything except strictly organic food she had previously ``eaten only infrequently or never at all.'' Swander entertains with her quest to find tolerable foods (frogs legs, bear, road kill, etc.) but soon reveals that her allergies extend even farther, to most things synthetic, like toothpaste and man-made fibers. Readers would certainly rally behind Swander's valiant effort to reconstruct her life with ``environmental illness'' if only she didn't lapse into judgment and self-pity: She blames being single on her disease because men expected her to cook ``normal meals'' for them, she rages against the inconvenience of having to ask friends not to wear perfume into her home, she lectures on global warming. Some relief from this tirade is offered by her straightforward and detailed observation of the Amish, but these welcome interludes are few and far between. (Another report on environmental illness is Myrna and Heather Millar's The Toxic Labyrinth, p. 616.) Pass over the world-peace pedantry for the rare but lucid insights on one of this county's misunderstood cultures.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
