NONFICTION - May 28, 1995

OUT OF THIS WORLD: A Woman’s Life Among the Amish by Mary Swander (Viking: $21.95; 270 pp.) Here’s an idea: If you read enough books about people who leave it all for a simpler life you can put it off yourself. Hunker down and prepare to take to the woods. Read all about it on your Exercycle before work. In her 40s, Mary Swander goes to live among the Amish in an Iowa farmhouse west of the Mississippi. She goes to “find balance and reawaken myself to a life of simplicity,” but in many ways life has somewhat brutally prepared her for the change. The victim of a million allergies, after a childhood in which she is forced to eat foods that make her violently ill, Swander cannot eat or breathe in anything with preservatives, additives or chemicals. She cannot eat most of the meats and grains and dairy products that are the scaffolding of the American diet. She can eat things such as frogs legs, venison, bear and duck, scaffolding of the Martian diet. Vegetables grown organically are OK, too.

She grows up a shy child and an isolated adult: The perfect pioneer. Having to consider life’s smallest details and dust particles has made her polite and considerate and fastidious: The perfect neighbor for the Amish. Among them, she finds a community that doesn’t make her feel like a freak; creates a successful life from a handful, as far as I can see, of short change; takes her talent for healing (many years as a massage therapist) and heals herself.