Mike Rinder’s parents began taking him to their local Scientology center when he was five years old. After high school, he signed a billion-year contract and was admitted into Scientology’s elite inner circle, the Sea Organization. Brought to founder L. Ron Hubbard’s yacht and promised training in Hubbard’s most advanced techniques, Rinder was instead put to work swabbing the decks. Still, Rinder bought into the doctrine that his personal comfort was secondary to the higher purpose of Hubbard’s world-saving mission.

Retired Navy SEAL Drago Dzieran takes listeners behind the scenes of his incredible life, from an impoverished childhood in Communist-controlled Poland to his time as a political prisoner, to his twenty years as a member of the United States military's most elite fighting force.

The daughter of immigrants and civil rights activists, Vice President Kamala Harris was raised in an Oakland, California, community that cared deeply about social justice. As she rose to prominence as one of the political leaders of our time, her experiences would become her guiding light as she grappled with an array of complex issues and learned to bring a voice to the voiceless. In The Truths We Hold, she reckons with the big challenges we face together.

Former ICE Director Tom Homan has been at the forefront of the conservative fight to secure our borders and offers proof that illegal immigration is not a victimless crime. In Defend the Border and Save Lives, Homan shares what illegal immigration is really about. Illegal immigration should not be a partisan issue. Now is the time to fix this issue that has claimed so many victims and divided this country. We need to pull the curtain back and expose what truly happens and separate facts from fiction.

Susan Burton's world changed in an instant when her five-year-old son was killed by a van driving down their street. Consumed by grief and without access to professional help, Susan self-medicated, becoming addicted first to cocaine then to crack. As a resident of South Los Angeles, a Black community under siege in the War on Drugs, it was but a matter of time before Susan was arrested. She cycled in and out of prison for over 15 years; never was she offered therapy or treatment for addiction.

We call it domestic violence. We call it private violence. Sometimes we call it intimate terrorism. But whatever we call it, we generally do not believe it has anything at all to do with us, despite the World Health Organization deeming it a 'global epidemic'. In No Visible Bruises, journalist Rachel Louise Snyder gives context for what we don't know we're seeing. She frames this urgent and immersive account of the scale of domestic violence in our country around key stories that explode the common myths....

In late 2006, Saket Soni, a 28-year-old, Indian-born community organizer received an anonymous phone call from an Indian migrant worker inside a Mississippi labor camp. He and 500 other men were living in squalor in Gulf Coast “man camps,” surrounded by barbed wire, watched by armed guards, crammed into cold trailers with putrid portable toilets, forced to eat moldy bread and frozen rice. Worse, lured by the promise of good work and green cards, the men had desperately scraped together up to $20,000 each to apply for this “opportunity”.

Crystal methamphetamine is widely considered to be the most dangerous drug in the world, and nowhere is that more true than in the small towns of the American heartland. Methland tells the story of Oelwein, Iowa (pop. 6,159), which, like thousands of other small towns across the country, has been left in the dust by the consolidation of the agricultural industry, a depressed local economy, and an out-migration of people.

Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish---now known simply as the "Gaza doctor"---captured hearts and headlines around the world in the aftermath of horrific tragedy: On January 16, 2009, Israeli shells hit his home in the Gaza Strip, killing three of his daughters and his niece. By turns inspiring and heartbreaking, hopeful and horrifying, I Shall Not Hate is Abuelaish's account of an extraordinary life.

From the award-winning NBC News and MSNBC correspondent comes a powerful and deeply reported journey to lay bare the full truth behind the defining moral crisis of the Trump years: the systematic separation of thousands of desperate migrant families at the US-Mexico border....

During his 28-year career, Matthew Horace rose through the ranks from a police officer working the beat to a federal agent working criminal cases in some of the toughest communities in America to a highly decorated federal law enforcement executive managing high-profile investigations nationwide. Yet it was not until seven years into his service - when Horace found himself face down on the ground with a gun pointed at his head by a white fellow officer - that he fully understood the racism seething within America's police departments.

For the first time, learn what really happened inside the walls of Hotel des Mille Collines. In Inside the Hotel Rwanda, survivor Edouard Kayihura tells his own personal story of what life was really like during those harrowing days within the walls of that infamous hotel and offers the testimonies of others who survived there, from Hutu and Tutsi to UN peacekeepers. Kayihura writes of a divided society and his journey to the place he believed would be safe from slaughter.

In 2005, after working for 10 years in a comfortable but mundane corporate job in San Antonio, Texas, Vincent Sellers successfully managed to leave behind a dreary cubicle landscape and begin the exciting challenges of a crime-fighting FBI agent. His journey is chronicled in Eyes Pried Open: Rookie FBI Agent. Listeners will experience both the highs and the lows of an FBI agent working bank robbery, kidnapping, murder-for-hire cases, and border-related crimes in San Diego, California.

With her election to the vice presidency, her election to the US Senate, and her position as attorney general of California, Kamala Harris has blazed trails throughout her entire political career. But how did she achieve her goals? What values and influences guided and inspired her along the way? In this young readers edition of Kamala Harris’ memoir, we learn about the impact that her family and community had on her life and see what led her to discover her own sense of self and purpose.

The weekly column Ask a North Korean, published by NK News, invites readers from around the world to pose questions to North Korean defectors. By way of these fascinating interviews, the North Koreans themselves provide authentic firsthand testimonies about what is happening inside the "Hermit Kingdom." This book sheds critical light on all aspects of North Korean politics and society and shows that even in the world's most authoritarian regime, life goes on in ways that are very different from what you may think.

One day a few years ago, 300 migrants were kidnapped between the remote desert towns of Altar, Mexico, and Sasabe, Arizona. A local priest got 120 released, many with broken ankles and other marks of abuse, but the rest vanished. Óscar Martinez, a young writer from El Salvador, was in Altar soon after the abduction, and his account of the migrant disappearances is only one of the harrowing stories he garnered from two years spent traveling up and down the migrant trail from Central America and across the US border.

Susan Burton's world changed in an instant when her five-year-old son was killed by a van driving down their street. Consumed by grief and without access to professional help, Susan self-medicated, becoming addicted first to cocaine then to crack. As a resident of South Los Angeles, a Black community under siege in the War on Drugs, it was but a matter of time before Susan was arrested. She cycled in and out of prison for over 15 years; never was she offered therapy or treatment for addiction.

The CIA is looking for walking contradictions. Recruiters seek people who can keep a secret, yet pull classified information out of others; who love their country, but are willing to leave it behind to head into dangerous places; who live double lives, but can be trusted with some of the nation's most sensitive tasks. Michele Rigby Assad was one of those people. As a CIA agent, Michele soon found that working undercover was an all-encompassing job. The threats were real. The mission was a perilous one. Trained as a counterterrorism expert, Michele spent over a decade in the agency.

Human trafficking is not just something that happens in other countries. Nor is it something that just happens to "other people," such as runaways or the disenfranchised. Even kids in your own neighborhood can fall victim. But they don't have to.

Crystal methamphetamine is widely considered to be the most dangerous drug in the world, and nowhere is that more true than in the small towns of the American heartland. Methland tells the story of Oelwein, Iowa (pop. 6,159), which, like thousands of other small towns across the country, has been left in the dust by the consolidation of the agricultural industry, a depressed local economy, and an out-migration of people.

A powerful memoir by Nury Turkel lays bare China’s repression of the Uyghur people. Turkel is cofounder and board chair of the Uyghur Human Rights Project and a commissioner for the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom.

The weekly column Ask a North Korean, published by NK News, invites readers from around the world to pose questions to North Korean defectors. By way of these fascinating interviews, the North Koreans themselves provide authentic firsthand testimonies about what is happening inside the "Hermit Kingdom." This book sheds critical light on all aspects of North Korean politics and society and shows that even in the world's most authoritarian regime, life goes on in ways that are very different from what you may think.

One of the least understood countries in the world, North Korea has long been known for its repressive regime. Yet it is far from being an impenetrable black box. Media flows covertly into the country, and fault lines are appearing in the government's sealed informational borders. Drawing on deeply personal interviews with North Korean defectors from all walks of life, ranging from propaganda artists to diplomats, Jieun Baek tells the story of North Korea's information underground.

Chief Carmen Best has spent the last 28 years as a member of a big-city police force, an institution where minorities and women have historically found it especially difficult to succeed. She defied the odds and became the first Black woman to lead the Seattle Police Department.

Drone pilots who carry out targeted assassinations. Undocumented immigrants who man the "kill floors" of industrial slaughterhouses. Guards who patrol the wards of America's most violent and abusive prisons. In Dirty Work, Eyal Press offers a paradigm-shifting view of the moral landscape of contemporary America through the stories of people who perform society's most ethically troubling jobs. As Press shows, we are increasingly shielded and distanced from an array of morally questionable activities that other, less privileged people perform in our name.

Nemesis is the story of an ordinary man who became the king of the largest slum in Rio, the head of a drug cartel, and perhaps Brazil's most wanted criminal. It's a gripping tale of gold hunters and evangelical pastors, bent police and rich-kid addicts, quixotic politicians and drug lords with math degrees. Traversing through rain forests and high-security prisons, filthy slums and glittering shopping malls, this is also the story of how change came to Brazil.

For the first time, learn what really happened inside the walls of Hotel des Mille Collines. In Inside the Hotel Rwanda, survivor Edouard Kayihura tells his own personal story of what life was really like during those harrowing days within the walls of that infamous hotel and offers the testimonies of others who survived there, from Hutu and Tutsi to UN peacekeepers. Kayihura writes of a divided society and his journey to the place he believed would be safe from slaughter.

In Saving Aziz, Chad will give you a behind-the-scenes view of the evacuation efforts that saved thousands from the Taliban during the historic humanitarian crisis following the United States’ hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The dramatic memoir of the journalist who was held hostage in a high-security prison in Tehran for 18 months and whose release - which almost didn’t happen - became a part of the Iran nuclear deal.

Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish---now known simply as the "Gaza doctor"---captured hearts and headlines around the world in the aftermath of horrific tragedy: On January 16, 2009, Israeli shells hit his home in the Gaza Strip, killing three of his daughters and his niece. By turns inspiring and heartbreaking, hopeful and horrifying, I Shall Not Hate is Abuelaish's account of an extraordinary life.