Mary Swander's Books

Out of This World

A Journey of Healing

By: Mary Swander

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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 crèche 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.

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Page Count

289

Publisher

University of Iowa Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1609380207

ISBN 13

9781609380205

The Six-Minute Memoir

Fifty-Five Short Essays on Life

By: Mary Helen Stefaniak

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The Six-Minute Memoir

Fifty-Five Short Essays on Life

By: Mary Helen Stefaniak

This collection of short essays delivers more joy than many books twice its size. Culled from two decades’ worth of Mary Helen Stefaniak’s “Alive and Well” column in the Iowa Source, each essay invites readers into the ordinary life of a woman “with a family and friends and a job . . . and a series of cats and a history living in one old house after another at the turn of the twenty-first century in the middle of the Middle West.” One great aunt presides over nineteen acres of pecan grove profitably strewn with junk. A borrowed hammer rings with the sound of immortality. Famous poets pipe up where you least expect them. Living and dying are found to be two sides of the same remarkable coin. What’s more, writing prompts at the end of the book invite readers to search their own lives for such moments—the kind that could be forgotten but instead are turned, by the gift of perspective and perfectly chosen detail, into treasure. The Six-Minute Memoir encourages people to tell their own stories even if they think they don’t have the kind of story that belongs in a memoir.

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Page Count

281

Publisher

University of Iowa Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1609388526

ISBN 13

9781609388522

Walking Seasonal Roads

By: Mary A. Hood

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Walking Seasonal Roads

By: Mary A. Hood

Seasonal roads are defined as one-lane dirt roads not maintained during the winter. They function as connectors linking farmers to their fields, neighbors to neighbors, or two more well-traveled roads to each other. Some access hunting lands and recreational areas. Some pass by cemeteries, allowing people to visit and honor their dead. They can be abandoned as people move and towns fade. In every incarnation, the seasonal road touches the land in a gentler way than do other roads. Having traveled nearly every seasonal road in Steuben County, New York, Hood finds they provide the ideal vantage to contemplate the meaning of place, offering intimate contact with plant and wildlife and the beauty of a rural landscape. Each road reveals how our land is used, how our land is protected, and how environmental factors have impacted the land. As a literary naturalist, Hood reflects on endangered species and invasive species, as well as on issues of conservation and sustainability. From state forests to potato fields, from development along Keuka Lake to vineyards, from old family cemeteries to logging sites, Walking Seasonal Roads is a celebration and an honoring of the rural and the regionalism of place, illustrating the ways we connect to our home and to each other.

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Page Count

194

Publisher

Syracuse University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0815651740

ISBN 13

9780815651741

Running with Expanding Heart

Meeting God in Everyday Life

By: Mary Reuter

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Running with Expanding Heart

Meeting God in Everyday Life

By: Mary Reuter

Mary Reuter recalls how as a child taking piano lessons she often skipped practicing scales and thought her teacher would not notice. Reuter admits she never did advance to the level of a skilled pianist. But in Running with Expanding Heart readers will discover that she is well practiced, and thus skilled, in paying attention to the extraordinary in the ordinary, in discovering the presence of God in the events of daily life. Through Reuter’s poignant and humorous stories, and through her careful listening to Scripture and the Rule of Benedict, readers will also take up the practice of looking for God in unexpected places—and in doing so they will find their hearts expanding with the unconditional and all-embracing love of God. Mary Reuter, OSB, is a member of Saint Benedict’s Monastery in St. Joseph, Minnesota, where she served as prioress from 1989–1995. She currently teaches in the department of theology at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University.

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Page Count

154

Publisher

Liturgical Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0814639208

ISBN 13

9780814639207

The Masks of Anthony and Cleopatra

By: Marvin Rosenberg,Mary Rosenberg

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The Masks of Anthony and Cleopatra

By: Marvin Rosenberg,Mary Rosenberg

In his analysis, Marvin Rosenberg sets out to steer a path between the "extremes" of Rome and Egypt and all they stand for: and to explore the relentless "to and back" confrontation of their different sets of values which leads ultimately to destruction.

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Page Count

628

Publisher

University of Delaware Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0874139244

ISBN 13

9780874139242

The Strangler Fig and Other Tales

Field Notes of a Conservationist

By: Mary A. Hood

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The Strangler Fig and Other Tales

Field Notes of a Conservationist

By: Mary A. Hood

Hood's travel memoir is a lyrical journey to places of great natural beauty and biological importance. Her stories reveal the vulnerability of natural places and the consequences of unsustainable exploitation. This inspiring work will be valuable for those interested in nature or travel memoirs, ethnographic writing, and for all who are concerned with the survival of our broader sense of place in the global environment.

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Page Count

218

Publisher

Rowman Altamira

Published Date

ISBN 10

0759106770

ISBN 13

9780759106772

American Poets and Poetry [2 volumes]

From the Colonial Era to the Present [2 volumes]

By: Jeffrey Gray,Mary McAleer Balkun,James McCorkle

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American Poets and Poetry [2 volumes]

From the Colonial Era to the Present [2 volumes]

By: Jeffrey Gray,Mary McAleer Balkun,James McCorkle

The ethnically diverse scope, broad chronological coverage, and mix of biographical, critical, historical, political, and cultural entries make this the most useful and exciting poetry reference of its kind for students today. American poetry springs up out of all walks of life; its poems are "maternal as well as paternal...stuff'd with the stuff that is coarse and stuff'd with the stuff that is fine," as Walt Whitman wrote, adding "Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion." Written for high school and undergraduate students, this two-volume encyclopedia covers U.S. poetry from the Colonial era to the present, offering full treatments of hundreds of key poets of the American canon. What sets this reference apart is that it also discusses events, movements, schools, and poetic approaches, placing poets in their social, historical, political, cultural, and critical contexts and showing how their works mirror the eras in which they were written. Readers will learn about surrealism, ekphrastic poetry, pastoral elegy, the Black Mountain poets, and "language" poetry. There are long and rich entries on modernism and postmodernism as well as entries related to the formal and technical dimensions of American poetry. Particular attention is paid to women poets and poets from various ethnic groups. Poets such as Amiri Baraka, Nathaniel Mackey, Natasha Trethewey, and Tracy Smith are featured. The encyclopedia also contains entries on a wide selection of Latino and Native American poets and substantial coverage of the avant-garde and experimental movements and provides sidebars that illuminate key points.

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Page Count

786

Publisher

Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published Date

ISBN 10

1610698320

ISBN 13

9781610698320

The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans

Poems

By: Mary Jo Bang

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The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans

Poems

By: Mary Jo Bang

This compelling book takes its title from Samuel Beckett's Ohio Impromptu. In Beckett's play, a grieving beloved seeks relief from the haunting presence of a departed lover in a place where "From its single window he could see the downstream extremity of the Isle of Swans." With a bow to Beckett's style and linguistic playfulness, Mary Jo Bang's collection of poems deals compassionately and gracefully with the tangible world. Bang's savvy alliterative insistence sweeps the reader along, as her poems collectively offer a world delicately structured from memorable fragments of experience, emotion, things, and places--inside and outside the human psyche.

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University of Georgia Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

082032292X

ISBN 13

9780820322926

Modern Hamlets and Their Soliloquies

By: Mary Zenet Maher

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Modern Hamlets and Their Soliloquies

By: Mary Zenet Maher

In "Modern Hamlets and Their Soliloquies" (Iowa, 1992), Mary Maher examined how modern actors have chosen to perform HamletOCOs soliloquies, and why they made the choices they made, within the context of their specific productions of the play. Adding to original interviews with, among others, Derek Jacobi, David Warner, Kevin Kline, and Ben Kingsley, "Modern Hamlets and Their Soliloquies: An Expanded Edition" offers two new and insightful interviews, one with Kenneth Branagh, focusing on his 1997 film production of the play, and one with Simon Russell Beale, discussing his 2000-2001 run as Hamlet at the Royal National Theatre.

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Page Count

316

Publisher

University of Iowa Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1587291363

ISBN 13

9781587291364

The Desert Pilgrim

En Route to Mysticism and Miracles

By: Mary Swander

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The Desert Pilgrim

En Route to Mysticism and Miracles

By: Mary Swander

Revealing what it means in this modern age to believe, an award-winning writer, poet, and radio commentator relates her inspiring journey of physical and spiritual healing in the American Southwest.

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356

Publisher

Penguin Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

0142196304

ISBN 13

9780142196304

The Desert Pilgrim

En Route to Mysticism and Miracles

By: Mary Swander

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The Desert Pilgrim

En Route to Mysticism and Miracles

By: Mary Swander

Revealing what it means in this modern age to believe, an award-winning writer, poet, and radio commentator relates her inspiring journey of physical and spiritual healing in the American Southwest.

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356

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Penguin Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

0142196304

ISBN 13

9780142196304

Science and Health

With Key to the Scriptures

By: Mary Baker Eddy

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Science and Health

With Key to the Scriptures

By: Mary Baker Eddy

First published in 1875 and read by more than eight million people, this nondenominational book has a 119-year history of healing and inspiration. To attract a new audience, this time-honored message of healing has a powerful new cover, easy-to-read page layout, and word index. Named one of "75 Books by Women Whose Words Have Changed the World".

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1622

Published Date

ISBN 10

187864100X

ISBN 13

9781878641007

The Maverick M.D. - Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez and His Fight for a New Cancer Treatment

By: Mary Swander

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The Maverick M.D. - Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez and His Fight for a New Cancer Treatment

By: Mary Swander

THE AUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY: When Nick Gonzalez was a medical student, he stood beside his father's deathbed and vowed that he would find a cure for cancer. Nick imagined his future as a researcher toiling away in a lab in Memorial Sloan Kettering, working on conventional approaches to the disease. Yet Gonzalez's life was anything but conventional. At the urging of Linus Pauling, he had already left an accomplished journalism career and entered Cornell Medical School. Gonzalez's path took another turn when he met the controversial Dr. William Kelley, a dentist who, through an alternative nutritional approach, had arrested his own pancreatic cancer. Kelley had become infamous when he'd tried to help others. The Maverick M.D. is the story of how Dr. Nick Gonzalez perfected the scientific theory behind Kelley's work and put the protocol into practice in New York City. Gonzalez drew courage from his Christian faith, from his Mexican-Italian-American family, and from key loved ones, colleagues and mentors. He spent years treating patients with the most serious conditions--from cancer to diabetes to lupus. But he wasn't satisfied as an outlier in the medical community. He wanted his work put to the test with a clinical trial. Gonzalez could have gone to Mexico where his family had lived and set up a cancer clinic alongside other alternative practitioners. Instead, he stayed in New York City, secured the funding, and fought to have his protocol tested through a properly run clinical trial. The Maverick, M.D. dramatizes Nicholas Gonzalez' backstory and his battles with the forces that sought to squelch his research, keeping his healing discoveries in medicine from reaching the world. This book portrays a man who fought for the acceptance of a nutritional cancer treatment in the halls of some of the most established U.S. medical institutions. Against intense opposition, Nick Gonzalez's determination held up until the end--a scientist who developed a therapy that saves lives and promotes the healing of the human mind, body and spirit.

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Page Count

410

Published Date

ISBN 10

0998546062

ISBN 13

9780998546063

Living with Topsoil

Tending Spirits, Cherishing Land

By: Mary Swander

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Living with Topsoil

Tending Spirits, Cherishing Land

By: Mary Swander

Living in the Midwest means living with the richest, most fertile land in the world. This Harvest Book engages the reader on a quest to connect sense-of-place with spirituality. Many of Iowa's top writers are included in this collection. Ideas range from fossils to red cabbage, from Eden to livestock.

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Page Count

102

Published Date

ISBN 10

1888160993

ISBN 13

9781888160994

Book's by Mary Swander

Out of This World

Out of This World

The Six-Minute Memoir

The Six-Minute Memoir

Walking Seasonal Roads

Walking Seasonal Roads

Running with Expanding Heart

Running with Expanding Heart

The Masks of Anthony and Cleopatra

The Masks of Anthony and Cleopatra

The Strangler Fig and Other Tales

The Strangler Fig and Other Tales

American Poets and Poetry [2 volumes]

American Poets and Poetry [2 volumes]

The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans

The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans

Modern Hamlets and Their Soliloquies

Modern Hamlets and Their Soliloquies

The Desert Pilgrim

The Desert Pilgrim

The Desert Pilgrim

The Desert Pilgrim

Science and Health

Science and Health

The Maverick M.D. - Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez and His Fight for a New Cancer Treatment

The Maverick M.D. - Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez and His Fight for a New Cancer Treatment

Living with Topsoil

Living with Topsoil

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