Sweet Heaven When I Die: Faith, Faithlessness, and the Country In Between

by Jeff Sharlet

Overview

“A master investigative stylist and one of the shrewdest commentators on religion’s underexplored realms.”—Michael Washburn, Washington Post

In this gorgeous collection of essays that has drawn comparisons to the work of Joan Didion, John McPhee, and Norman Mailer, best-selling author Jeff Sharlet reports back from the far reaches of belief, whether in the clear mountain air of “Sweet Fuck All, Colorado” or in a midnight congregation of anarchists celebrating a victory over police. Like movements in a complex piece of music, Sharlet’s dispatches vibrate with all the madness and beauty, the melancholy and aspirations for transcendence, of American life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393344233
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	09/10/2012
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Jeff Sharlet is the New York Times best-selling author or editor of eight books, including The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War and The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, adapted into a Netflix documentary series. His reporting on LGBTIQ+ rights around the world has received the National Magazine Award, the Molly Ivins Prize, and Outright International’s Outspoken Award. His writing and photography have appeared in many publications, including Vanity Fair, for which he is a contributing editor; the New York Times Magazine; GQ; Esquire; Harper’s Magazine; and VQR, for which he is an editor at large. He is the Frederick Sessions Beebe ’35 Professor in the Art of Writing at Dartmouth College, where he lives in the woods with many animals.

Table of Contents

1 Sweet Fuck All, Colorado 1

2 Bad Moon Rising 43

3 Begin with the Dead 47

4 You Must Draw a Long Bead to Shoot a Fish 75

5 Quebrado 91

6 For Every Life Saved 121

7 Clouds, When Determined by Context 145

8 It Costs Nothing to Say 151

9 She Said Yes 161

10 What They Wanted 187

11 The Rapture 193

12 Rock Like Fuck 215

13 Born, Again 245

Acknowledgments 261

Editorial Reviews

"Part reporter, part prophet, Jeff Sharlet is an American visionary in the lineage that runs from Twain to Robinson Jeffers to Sam Shepard and Joan Didion. In Sweet Heaven When I Die, he scours the desert margins of our culture, politics, and religion, training his eye on outlaws, anarchists, fanatics, and saints. In this way, he reveals the unexpected shape of our nation’s center, which is to say, our heart."

Peter Trachtenberg

"The book belongs to the tradition of long-form, narrative journalism best exemplified by writers such as Joan Didion, John McPhee, Norman Mailer and Sharlet’s contemporary David Samuels. Sharlet deserves a place alongside such masters, for he has emerged as a master investigative stylist and one of the shrewdest commentators on religion’s underexplored realms."

The Washington Post - Michael Washburn

"For Sharlet, the story of American religion is not a polarized one of fundamentalists vs. secularists. It’s a vast landscape, and each essay in his remarkable new collection of literary journalism explores a different crag or cranny of it…. There’s no better guide to this ‘country in between.’"

The Boston Globe - Brook Wilensky-Lanford

"[A] collection of beautifully written narratives.... Sharlet's previous works have incisively critiqued fundamentalism and American power; Sweet Heaven is equally thoughtful, but tender, acknowledging that between the extremes of snake handlers and nihilists, most of us wander through life groping for meaning, with consolation that in the act of finding, we too, may be found."

NC Independent Durham

"A Must-Read…. Brilliant portraits of the religious fringe…fleshed out in lush three-dimensional detail—a lifetime in a dozen pages, a biography distilled to its purest elements…. Sharlet impresses with his ability to mine the common humanity that lingers in even the most radically minded thinkers."

The Daily Beast

"Superb… Compelling… Stunning… A fine book, by a deeply thoughtful writer."

The Oregonian - Steve Yarbrough

"Brilliant portraits of faith, despair and the fictions that keep people going. . . . [Sharlet’s] often-elegiac prose rumbles with
the fierce rhythms of the blues."

Seven Days

"Sharp and intimate."

Rolling Stone

"The characters in Sweet Heaven When I Die are rough, unfulfilled, often doomed. But that’s what makes this collection so strong, so human. We always suspect that by the end, they will be betrayed by their beliefs, will be disillusioned or destroyed. But failure doesn’t make belief meaningless. It may be the only thing that gives faith meaning at all."

Kansas City Star

Jeff Sharlet delivers a fine dose of thoughtful skepticism in Sweet Heaven When I Die, his collection of 13 trenchant essays on how we gain, lose, maintain and blindly accept faith. The book belongs to the tradition of long-form, narrative journalism best exemplified by writers such as Joan Didion, John McPhee, Norman Mailer and Sharlet's contemporary David Samuels. Sharlet deserves a place alongside such masters, for he has emerged as a master investigative stylist and one of the shrewdest commentators on religion's underexplored realms.
—The Washington Post

Michael Washburn

In a wide-ranging collection of personal essays, Sharlet (The Family) provides various takes on faith in the form of profiles of a diverse group among the faithful and the faithless including a politician, a philosopher, an anarchist, a Yiddish novelist, and a group of evangelical teens. One essay follows a New Age healer who makes good business "cleansing" homes of bad vibes for a surprising number of New York City's real estate brokerages ("Sondra's healing services were no sillier or more profound than the idea that by dunking yourself in water, you experience death and resurrection"). The author sometimes slips into easy armchair philosophizing, but the sketches themselves offer nuanced and genuinely touching portraits of people from all walks, giving impressions of evangelicals in the throes of doubt as well as skeptics who want badly to be religious, but can't bring themselves to it. Although the essays have the theme of faith in common, the diversity of their individual subjects is less a virtue than a lack of focus that may disappoint some readers, while others may be interested in working to discern, or invent for themselves, the points of intersection among these essays. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

The book belongs to the tradition of long-form, narrative journalism best exemplified by writers such as Joan Didion, John McPhee, Norman Mailer and Sharlet’s contemporary David Samuels. Sharlet deserves a place alongside such masters, for he has emerged as a master investigative stylist and one of the shrewdest commentators on religion’s underexplored realms.— Michael Washburn

The Washington Post

For Sharlet, the story of American religion is not a polarized one of fundamentalists vs. secularists. It’s a vast landscape, and each essay in his remarkable new collection of literary journalism explores a different crag or cranny of it…. There’s no better guide to this ‘country in between.’

The Boston Globe

Superb… Compelling… Stunning… A fine book, by a deeply thoughtful writer.— Steve Yarbrough

The Oregonian

A contributing editor to Rolling Stone and best-selling author of The Family and C Street, about fundamentalist influence in America (and beyond), Sharlet here profiles the fringiest of fringe beliefs to give us a broader view of faith in this country. Evangelists, banjo players, urban anarchists, the Mind Body, Spirit Expo—they're all here in what should be a fascinating read.

Library Journal

A disjointed collection of essays profiling a diverse set of faith-based leaders across the American landscape.

In his latest book, Sharlet (C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy, 2010, etc.) returns to religion but casts a wider net, peering into the nooks and crannies of modern American faiths largely by examining their leaders. Writing with a casual, conversational hand—almost as if transcribing an episode of This American Life—the author chronicles his travels around the country. On his journeys, he visited the East Texas Honor Academy led by charismatic minister Ron Luce, who has spearheaded a virulent, nationwide fundamentalist Christian youth crusade. He mourned with the parents of anarchist Brad Will, who was gunned down for videotaping riots in Oaxaca, attended a New Age healing convention with a Kabbalist and Reiki master and waxed philosophical on Kierkegaard and W.E.B. Du Bois with Cornel West (seen by many as a prophet in his own right). In the first, perhaps most personal essay, Sharlet discusses his visit to his college girlfriend, Molly, in the small Colorado town where she lives with her preacher husband and serves as a gun-toting, horse-riding, morally bound district attorney. The author had spent a summer in Colorado with Molly in college, and his return there makes stark the contrast between the liberal path that he took and the Christian, conservative one that she did. Sharlet has plenty of reason for confusion—his parents divorced early, and he was raised largely by his Christian mother, until she died when he was 16 and his Jewish father took over. But while he interjects some personal questions into his essays, they seem largely incidental and don't effectively bind the shorter pieces.

Sharlet admits that many of these essays were born from research for other books, and that's how they read: well-written but disconnected parts of several larger wholes.

Kirkus Reviews