The Believer: Encounters with the Beginning, the End, and our Place in the Middle
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2.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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."
