The Believer

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.