The Believer: Encounters with the Beginning, the End, and our Place in the Middle

by Sarah Krasnostein

Overview

A New Yorker Best Book of 2022

A Best Book of the Month at The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Deeply beautiful, and never simple.” —James Gleick, author of Time Travel: A History

An unforgettable tour of the human condition that explores our universal need for belief to help us make sense of life, death, and everything in between.

For Sarah Krasnostein it begins with a Mennonite choir performing on a subway platform, a fleeting moment of witness that sets her on a fascinating journey to discover why people need to believe in absolute truths and what happens when their beliefs crash into her own. Some of the people Krasnostein interviews believe in things many people do not: ghosts, UFOs, the literal creation of the universe in six days. Some believe in things most people would like to: dying with dignity and autonomy; facing up to our transgressions with truthfulness; living with integrity and compassion. 

By turns devastating and uplifting, and captured in snapshot-vivid detail, these six profiles of a death doula, a geologist who believes the world is six thousand years old, a lecturer in neurobiology who spends his weekends ghost hunting, the fiancée of a disappeared pilot and UFO enthusiasts, a woman incarcerated for killing her husband after suffering years of domestic violence, and Mennonite families in New York will leave you convinced that the most ordinary-seeming people are often the most remarkable and that deep and abiding commonalities can be found within the greatest differences. 

Vivid, unconventional, entertaining, and full of wonder, The Believer interweaves these stories with compassion and empathy, culminating in an unforgettable tour of the human condition that cuts to the core of who we are as people, and what we’re doing on this earth.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781953534002
Publisher:	Tin House Books
Publication date:	03/01/2022
Pages:	360
Sales rank:	1,046,302
Product dimensions:	8.60(w) x 5.60(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Sarah Krasnostein is a writer and lawyer with a doctorate in criminal law. Born in Charlottesville, Virginia, she divides her time between Melbourne and New York. Sarah’s first book, The Trauma Cleaner, won Australia’s Victorian Prize for Literature, where it was a runaway bestseller.

Table of Contents

Prologue

Sarah 1

The Choir 4

Part I Below

The Death Doula In The Beginning Paranormal

The Death Doula: Katrina & Annie 9

Paranormal: Vlad 16

In the Beginning: The Ark 18

The Death Doula: Annie 21

Paranormal: Vlad 23

In the Beginning: The Museum 34

The Death Doula: Annie 40

In the Beginning: Georgia 48

Paranormal: Vlad 54

The Death Doula: Annie 61

In the Beginning: Georgia 71

Paranormal: Rob 75

The Death Doula: Annie 86

In the Beginning: Andrew 94

Paranormal: The Vigil 102

The Death Doula: Annie & Katrina 111

Paranormal: Rob 120

The Death Doula: Annie & Katrina 126

In the Beginning: Tim 133

Paranormal: Vlad 141

The Death Doula: Katrina 153

In the Beginning: Georgia 161

The Death Doula: Katrina 166

Paranormal: Rob 174

The Death Doula: Katrina 185

Part II Above

Halfway Home Theories of Flight The Kingdom of Heaven

Halfway Home: Lynn 191

Theories of Flight: Fred & Rhonda 192

The Kingdom of Heaven: Sunday Service 204

Theories of Flight: Fred & Rhonda 210

Halfway Home: Lynn 221

The Kingdom of Heaven: Loisann 227

Theories of Flight: Fred & Rhonda 236

Halfway Home: Lynn 243

Theories of Flight: Westall 251

Halfway Home: Lynn 261

The Kingdom of Heaven: Becky 266

Theories of Flight: Don 273

Halfway Home: Lynn 277

Theories of Flight: Don & Colin 279

The Kingdom of Heaven: Anthony 287

Theories of Flight: Ben 293

Halfway Home: Lynn 306

Theories of Flight: Don 311

The Kingdom of Heaven: Becky & Tim 317

Halfway Home: Lynn 322

Theories of Flight: Jaimie & Aspasia 325

The Kingdom of Heaven: Prayer Meeting 337

Theories of Flight: Jaimie & Aspasia 344

The Kingdom of Heaven: Tim 351

Theories of Flight: Jaimie & Aspasia 360

Coda: Here

The Death Doula: Katrina & Annie 365

Halfway Home: Lynn 371

The Kingdom of Heaven: The Choir 379

Select Bibliography 391

Acknowledgments 398

Editorial Reviews

★ 01/24/2022

Journalist Krasnostein (The Trauma Cleaner) delivers an illuminating meditation on the nature of belief and the quest for meaning. In six profiles of individuals and communities animated by a “longing for the unattainable,” Krasnostein examines how belief can both strengthen and weaken interpersonal bonds. She explores supposedly haunted locales with paranormal investigators and talks with researchers at Kentucky’s Creation Museum, who attempt to reconcile scientific principles with their belief in biblical inerrancy. Some of the most moving chapters focus on Annie, a Buddhist-trained “death doula” and trauma survivor, and Katrina, one of her patients. Elsewhere, Krasnostein profiles people who believe in extraterrestrials and UFOs; a community of Mennonites who have moved from rural Pennsylvania to the South Bronx to conduct urban mission work; and a woman who joined a lower Manhattan church after spending half her life imprisoned for the murder of her abusive husband. Throughout, Krasnostein is measured and respectful of her interviewees while being forthright about beliefs she finds unconvincing or even distasteful. The result is a compassionate and engrossing look at “how the stories we tell ourselves to deal with the distance between the world as it is and as we’d like it to be can stunt us or save us.” (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"Compassion and curiosity permeate Sarah Krasnostein’s writing. Every few pages there is a line so poignant it takes my breath away."

Sasha Sagan

"A fascinating portrait of the human condition, Sarah Krasnostein’s latest explores a range of belief systems through six profiles—of a death doula, a geologist, a ghost-hunting neurobiologist, ufologists, a woman accused of murder, and Mennonite families living in New York. A great read for our ‘deeply fractured times.’"

LitHub

"Sarah Krasnostein holds a mirror to the world we inhabit but don’t fully understand, helping us see how our lives are shaped by beliefs at once wholly strange and unexpectedly familiar. Lyrical, haunting, endlessly curious, The Believer will restore your faith in the power of stories to bridge the gaps between us."

Peter Manseau

"Sarah Krasnostein’s The Believer is filled with everything the world needs more of: compassion, curiosity, and tenderness. Krasnostein brilliantly shows us how to look more carefully, listen more closely, and love more expansively. A complicated, lyrical portrait of belief, meaning making, and the stories we tell that might save us."

Sarah Sentilles

"The Believer succeeds at its goal of bridging distances, of transcending the self to comprehend the other."

NPR Books

"Fascinating."

Broadview

"This collection of essays will be great for groups looking for something approachable but thoughtful as Krasnostein explores all kinds of strangers’ beliefs about the afterlife, a higher power, and everything in between and what happens when their beliefs clash with the beliefs of others. It’s definitely a poignant piece for today and will open up lots of discussion possibilities for book groups."

Book Riot

"Explores the power of belief by weaving together six profiles of people who believe in ghosts and gods and flying saucers, people with whom Krasnostein has very little in common."

The Rumpus

"Sarah Krasnostein takes us on an unexpected journey through strains of belief that range from dubious to bizarre. It is sometimes disconcerting, sometimes deeply beautiful, and never simple."

James Gleick

"Revelatory."

The New Yorker

"Generous and compassionate. . . . Her talent for penetrating intimate settings and eliciting personal testimony is impressive. The profiles are fascinating."

The Washington Post

"In an era when it often appears as though beliefs are our biggest dividing lines, Sarah Krasnostein’s The Believer comes as a great tonic—a thoughtfully reported, entertaining, and empathetic examination of the beliefs that sustain yet sometimes dangerously mislead. Exacting yet compassionate, she takes readers deep inside communities and lives that may be distant from us, offering portraits that refract back on our own worlds. The result feels deeply wise. If reading a book can make you more human, The Believer does just that."

Alex Marzano-Lesnevich

"Brimming with poetic hope. . . . The Believer is an outstanding treatise on human relationships, with one another and the unexplained."

Starred Review Shelf Awareness

"Fans of Jon Ronson’s. . . . will appreciate this collection of interviews with interesting people who believe interesting things."

The Philadelphia Inquirer

"This is a must-read if you love these kind of journalistic deep-dives into Characters with a capital C. . . . You get that very rare experience of feeling like you understand other people a little bit better."

What's Nonfiction

2021-12-07
How does one confront the unknown and unknowable?

That is the central question in Krasnostein’s thoughtful meditation on humans’ desire for certainty, security, and solace. Describing herself as an educated, urbane, “secular humanist” Jew, the author is generous in her investigation of diverse individuals who share a common trait: “longing for the unattainable.” Her own search was ignited when she heard, by chance, a Mennonite choir singing at a Manhattan subway station. Transfixed by the sound and bond of community, she spent several months among Mennonites in the South Bronx, where she came to understand “their insistence on seeing a perfect pattern embroidered into the fabric of reality, constant confirmation—in the good and in the bad—of a loving presence.” Belief in that loving presence, in intelligent design, and in the Bible as historical fact has attracted some for whom scientific evidence is unconvincing. As to the existence of God, they refuse “to accept absence of evidence as evidence of absence.” At the Creation Museum in Kentucky, the Director of Research is a geologist. “He demonstrates,” Krasnostein writes, “that it is possible simultaneously to consider Satan your personal spiritual adversary and to stay up to date with the Journal of Geology.” The author also talked to a lecturer on the book of Genesis who has a doctorate in microbiology and believes Noah’s Ark had room for young dinosaurs. A woman whose fiance disappeared on a solo flight after seeing unidentifiable lights in the sky; a man who clears haunted houses; an investigator into parapsychology: All find comfort in their “bespoke delusions.” Krasnostein herself is no stranger to terror, confusion, and pain: Some of her family members were victims of the Holocaust; her mother left her when she was 10 “with explanations I did not understand at the time and do not understand now.” Near the end, she writes, “I believe that we are united in the emotions that drive us into the beliefs that separate us.”

A sympathetic inquiry into the vicissitudes of faith.

Kirkus Reviews