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The Believer: Encounters with the Beginning, the End, and Our Place in the Middle
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About This Book
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 find out 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 delighting, and captured in snapshot-vivid detail, these six profiles with 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 fiancé 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, Krasnostein interweaves the stories of these believers 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.
Reviews
"A sympathetic inquiry into the vicissitudes of faith."
"one of the pleasures of the book is noticing the moments in which the stories interweave or chime against each other."
"Some of the most moving chapters focus on Annie, a Buddhist-trained 'death doula' and trauma survivor, and Katrina, one of her patients ..."
"Krasnostein doesn't just act as a microphone for her subjects' beliefs; she pushes back against them at crucial junctures."
"Her tour of humanity, spanning unlighted country roads in Australia to crumbling apartments in the South Bronx, shows that many human beings benefit from finding an ideology that encompasses not just their beliefs but their ways of living."
"Here, in Krasnostein's evident respect for all three of these believers, we see Krasnostein's own beliefs find shape."
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