![]() ![]() This is a book that tries to understand what might unite us, what we might hold in common in the meanings that we make from the world and its materials, even when the beliefs that underpin them are so different, even diametrically opposed. ![]() ![]() So too is the phrase “more perfect union”, which of course comes from the American constitution, but in this particular context points to what is at the very heart of The Believer. The italics are Krasnostein’s own, and they are telling. “I am trying,” she writes, “to get closer to the possibility, at least, of a more perfect union.” Krasnostein is trying to understand what such a life might mean, but she is distracted: what she is feeling, on this day, is a “radiating shame for actually believing” that the election result could ever have been otherwise, in a country so deeply divided by inequality and irreconcilable worldviews. Krasnostein is in New York on the day after the election, visiting the home of one of the people whose portraits make up this book – a young Mennonite woman (“Like Amish, but not”) who has moved, with her family, from rural Pennsylvania to the Bronx, in order to spread her faith. T here’s a moment towards the end of The Believer where the author tries to reckon with the election of Donald Trump as the new leader of the country in which she was born, and with which she still maintains strong ties. ![]()
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