The Believer

January 1, 2022
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.

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Starred review from January 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.”

January 28, 2021
The people who populate The Believer are remarkably different from one another. There are, among others, a convicted murderer, a ‘death doula’, paranormal investigators, and Christian researchers who have dedicated their lives to the teaching of creationism. Sarah Krasnostein’s follow up to The Trauma Cleaner is the result of four years of research and interviews that took her across Australia and the US. The author has the rare combination of skills that allows her to not only build enough trust and rapport with her interview subjects that they will reveal intimate details about their lives, but to also distil a person down to their essence and put that on the page in a way that is simultaneously informative, sensitive and enthralling. In theory, the different interviews are loosely tethered by the themes of love, death and faith—but this is a wide net and even then some of the subjects feel like they don’t quite fit in this framework. Any disconnect is of little consequence, however, because the true strength of The Believer is in each compellingly rendered story, not in what they say together. Forcing a big-picture conclusion on this work would do a disservice to Krasnostein’s portrait of the chaos that is the shared human experience, which is drawn out person-by-person, interview-by-interview. Readers who liked The Trauma Cleaner or Ramona Koval’s A Letter To Layla will find much to appreciate in The Believer. Elizabeth Flux is a freelance writer and editor.