
Soldiers and Kings
Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling
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Narrated by:
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Jason De León
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By:
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Jason De León
About this listen
WINNER OF THE 2024 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION
A TIME 10 Best Nonfiction Book of 2024 • An NPR Book We Love 2024 • A New York Times Notable Book of 2024 • A Boston Globe Best Book of 2024
“A work of extraordinary reportage and compassion...[it] will shock you, move you, and leave you changed.”
—Matthew Desmond, Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author of Evicted and Poverty, by America
“An enlightening, frightening, unforgettable read.”
—Sandra Cisneros, bestselling author of The House on Mango Street
An intense, intimate and first-of-its-kind look at the world of human smuggling in Latin America, by a MacArthur "genius" grant winner and anthropologist with unprecedented access
Political instability, poverty, climate change, and the insatiable appetite for cheap labor all fuel clandestine movement across borders. As those borders harden, the demand for smugglers who aid migrants across them increases every year. Yet the real lives and work of smugglers—or coyotes, or guides, as they are often known by the migrants who hire their services—are only ever reported on from a distance, using tired tropes and stereotypes, often depicted as boogie men and violent warlords. In an effort to better understand this essential yet extralegal billion dollar global industry, internationally recognized anthropologist and expert Jason De León embedded with a group of smugglers moving migrants across Mexico over the course of seven years.
The result of this unique and extraordinary access is SOLDIERS AND KINGS: the first ever in-depth, character-driven look at human smuggling. It is a heart-wrenching and intimate narrative that revolves around the life and death of one coyote who falls in love and tries to leave smuggling behind. In a powerful, original voice, De León expertly chronicles the lives of low-level foot soldiers breaking into the smuggling game, and morally conflicted gang leaders who oversee rag-tag crews of guides and informants along the migrant trail. SOLDIERS AND KINGS is not only a ground-breaking up-close glimpse of a difficult-to-access world, it is a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction.
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Critic reviews
Orange County Register's "20 Highly Anticipated Books Coming in 2024 We Want to Read"
For seven years, de León tracked the lives of both migrants crossing the border and the coyotes who shepherded them. He unveils a profoundly intimate account of their world—of the work, the terror, and the human connections made on their treacherous journeys. A National Book Award finalist, Soldiers and Kings seeks to buck the dangerous stereotypes that are often associated with migrants and smugglers, and instead, shows their fully nuanced stories.—Time’s “100 Must Read Books of 2024”
“A unique read that emerges from seven years of research and firsthand experiences lived by the author amidst smugglers, or ‘guías,’ on the U.S.-Mexico border…De León offers a glimpse into a world rarely seen or understood.”—Los Angeles Times
“A rare inside look at human smuggling on the border … Smuggling, [De León] says, ‘is not the problem.’ But as his own book memorably recounts, in a world with no shortage of problems, it’s nevertheless one of them.”—The New York Times
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How America Created its Own Border Problem
- By Amazon Customer on 04-19-24
By: Jonathan Blitzer
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Invisible Rulers
- The People Who Turn Lies into Reality
- By: Renee DiResta
- Narrated by: Anna Caputo
- Length: 15 hrs
- Unabridged
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Renée DiResta’s powerful, original investigation into the way power and influence have been profoundly transformed reveals how a virtual rumor mill of niche propagandists increasingly shapes public opinion. While propagandists position themselves as trustworthy Davids, their reach, influence, and economics make them classic Goliaths—invisible rulers who create bespoke realities to revolutionize politics, culture, and society. Their work is driven by a simple maxim: if you make it trend, you make it true.
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the more things change...
- By Gina S. on 07-01-24
By: Renee DiResta
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Circle of Hope
- A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church
- By: Eliza Griswold
- Narrated by: Jennifer Pickens
- Length: 11 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Americans have been leaving their churches. Some drift away. Some stay home. And some have been searching for—and finding—more authentic ways to find and follow Jesus. This is the story of one such “radical outpost of Jesus followers” dedicated to service, the Sermon on the Mount, and working toward justice for all in this life, not just salvation for some in the next. Part of a little-known yet influential movement at the edge of American evangelicalism, Philadelphia’s Circle of Hope grew for forty years, planted four congregations, and then found itself in crisis.
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Honest and Compelling
- By SKC on 02-08-25
By: Eliza Griswold
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The Rediscovery of America
- Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (The Henry Roe Cloud Series on American Indians and Modernity)
- By: Ned Blackhawk
- Narrated by: Jason Grasl
- Length: 17 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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The most enduring feature of US history is the presence of Native Americans, yet most histories focus on Europeans and their descendants. This long practice of ignoring Indigenous history is changing, however, with a new generation of scholars insists that any full American history address the struggle, survival, and resurgence of American Indian nations. Indigenous history is essential to understanding the evolution of modern America.
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Interesting book marred by poor reading
- By Nathaniel Sterling on 03-04-24
By: Ned Blackhawk
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Rivermouth
- A Chronicle of Language, Faith, and Migration
- By: Alejandra Oliva
- Narrated by: Angela Juarez
- Length: 9 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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In this powerful and deeply felt polemic memoir, Alejandra Oliva, a Mexican-American translator and immigrant justice activist, offers a chronological document of her experience interpreting at the US-Mexico border, and of the people she has encountered along the way. Tracing her family's long and fluid relationship to the border, each generation born on opposite sides of the Rio Grande, and having worked on asylum cases since 2016, she knows all too well the gravity of taking someone's trauma and delivering it to the warped demands of the American immigration system.
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Loved the book not the reader
- By JSW on 11-22-23
By: Alejandra Oliva
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Cold Crematorium
- Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz
- By: József Debreczeni, Paul Olchváry - translator, Jonathan Freedland
- Narrated by: Laurence Dobiesz
- Length: 8 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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József Debreczeni, a prolific Hungarian-language journalist and poet, arrived in Auschwitz in 1944; had he been selected to go “left,” his life expectancy would have been approximately forty-five minutes. One of the “lucky” ones, he was sent to the “right,” which led to twelve horrifying months of incarceration and slave labor in a series of camps, ending in the “Cold Crematorium”—the so-called hospital of the forced labor camp Dörnhau, where prisoners too weak to work awaited execution.
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Learned so much more about the Holocaust
- By Jerseygirl on 02-03-24
By: József Debreczeni, and others
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Wilmington's Lie
- The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy
- By: David Zucchino
- Narrated by: Victor Bevine
- Length: 11 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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By the 1890s, Wilmington was North Carolina’s largest city and a shining example of a mixed-race community. It was a bustling port city with a burgeoning African American middle class and a Fusionist government of Republicans and Populists that included black aldermen, police officers, and magistrates. There were successful black-owned businesses and an African American newspaper, The Record. But across the state - and the South - white supremacist Democrats were working to reverse the advances made by former slaves and their progeny.
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HOW TO GAIN AN UNDERSTANDING OF HOW RACISM HAS BEEN USED AS A TOOL BY WEALTHY
- By Linzay on 06-19-20
By: David Zucchino
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The Return of Great Powers
- Russia, China, and the Next World War
- By: Jim Sciutto
- Narrated by: Jim Sciutto
- Length: 10 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 dawned what Francis Fukuyama called “The End of History.” Three decades later, Jim Sciutto said on CNN’s air as the Ukraine war began, that we are living in a “1939 moment.” History never ended—it barely paused—and the global order as we have known it is now gone. Great powers are reinvigorated and determined to assert dominance on the world stage. And as it escalates, this new order will affect everyone across the globe.
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Disappointing
- By Douglas Peifer on 03-14-24
By: Jim Sciutto
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Kareem Between
- By: Shifa Saltagi Safadi
- Narrated by: Peter Romano
- Length: 3 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Seventh grade begins, and Kareem’s already fumbled it. His best friend moved away, he messed up his tryout for the football team, and because of his heritage, he was voluntold to show the new kid—a Syrian refugee with a thick and embarrassing accent—around school. Just when Kareem thinks his middle school life has imploded, the hotshot QB promises to get Kareem another tryout for the squad. There’s a catch: to secure that chance, Kareem must do something he knows is wrong.
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Defectors
- The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America
- By: Paola Ramos
- Narrated by: Victoria Villarreal
- Length: 9 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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An award-winning journalist's exploration of how race, identity and political trauma have influenced the rise in far-right sentiment among Latinos, and how this group can shape American politics.
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Regretting what I taught my kids
- By Anonymous User on 10-17-24
By: Paola Ramos
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Unshrinking
- How to Face Fatphobia
- By: Kate Manne
- Narrated by: Kate Manne
- Length: 6 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Blending intimate stories with the trenchant analysis that has become her signature, Manne shows why fatphobia has become a vital social justice issue. Over the last several decades, implicit bias has waned in every category, from race to sexual orientation, except one: body size. Manne examines how anti-fatness operates—how it leads us to make devastating assumptions about a person’s attractiveness, fortitude, and intellect, and how it intersects with other systems of oppression.
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I felt that the author nailed it.
- By Anonymous User on 04-27-25
By: Kate Manne
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A Day in the Life of Abed Salama
- Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy
- By: Nathan Thrall
- Narrated by: Peter Ganim
- Length: 6 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Five-year-old Milad Salama is excited for a school trip to a theme park on the outskirts of Jerusalem. On the way, his bus collides with a semitrailer. His father, Abed, gets word of the crash and rushes to the site. The scene is chaos—the children have been taken to different hospitals in Jerusalem and the West Bank; some are missing, others cannot be identified. Abed sets off on an odyssey to learn Milad’s fate. It is every parent’s worst nightmare, but for Abed it is compounded by the maze of physical, emotional, and bureaucratic obstacles he must navigate because he is Palestinian.
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We Must Look Deeper into this Struggle
- By Amazon Customer on 10-22-23
By: Nathan Thrall
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Neighbors and Other Stories
- By: Diane Oliver
- Narrated by: Emana Rachelle
- Length: 8 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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A remarkable talent far ahead of her time, Diane Oliver died in 1966 at the age of 22, leaving behind these crisply told and often chilling tales that explore race and racism in 1950s and 60s America. In this first and only collection by a masterful storyteller finally taking her rightful place in the canon, Oliver’s insightful stories reverberate into the present day.
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mesmerizing
- By Dee in Philly on 02-26-24
By: Diane Oliver
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Let Only Red Flowers Bloom
- Identity and Belonging in Xi Jinping's China
- By: Emily Feng
- Narrated by: Emily Feng
- Length: 9 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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The rise of China and its great power competition with the U.S. will be one of the defining issues of our generation. But to understand modern China, one has to understand the people who live there–and the way the Chinese state is trying to control them along lines of identity and free expression. In vivid, cinematic detail, Let Only Red Flowers Bloom tells the stories of nearly two dozen people who are pushing back.
By: Emily Feng
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Fire Exit
- By: Morgan Talty
- Narrated by: Darrell Dennis
- Length: 6 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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From the porch of his home, Charles Lamosway has watched the life he might have had unfold across the river on Maine’s Penobscot Reservation. On the far bank, he caught brief moments of Roger and Mary raising their only child, Elizabeth from the day she came home from the hospital to her early twenties. But there’s always been something deeper and more dangerous than the river that divides him from this family and the rest of the tribal community. It’s the secret that Elizabeth is his daughter, a secret Charles is no longer willing to keep.
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Wonderful story about love, family , truth and deception and identity
- By ReallyNelie on 06-23-24
By: Morgan Talty
What listeners say about Soldiers and Kings
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- Amazon Customer
- 06-02-24
Gritty and raw
Gritty and compelling. I dreamt like I came to know the people in this book. A must read for anyone who wants to understand migration and human smuggling.
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- Ivonne Trelles
- 02-21-25
Astonishing and moving
Perhaps we need a bit less data and more detailed anthropological depictions of other human beings’ suffering to really understand social issues. This book does that. It brought tears to my eyes and changed my vision.
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- Gary
- 01-26-25
Non-fiction that readslike a novel
Beautifully presented story about a very timely topic, told with compassion. Well researched and consciousness raising.
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- KBW
- 01-12-25
Vivid characters with tragic backstories.
I enjoyed this deep dive into the culture and backstories of today’s smugglers of human beings from Central America to the US border. Overly long dialog, paragraphs, of supposed perspectives expressed by his research subjects, seemed a bit contrived to me. Did the author record these conversations in full and translate them vs re-create them from memory. I became impatient listening to these sections . Nonetheless the author painted vivid pictures of these characters’ idiosyncrasies as well as the brutal and violent childhood histories that launched their career paths.
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- Jason Como
- 04-13-25
Humanizes our neighbors to the south when it would be easy to just listen to myopic and over simplified news bites!
Chronicles the passage of those who make passage (the coyotes) for migrants (mostly Catrachos). Helps explain why people leave, what the suffer and how these ‘guías’ are so key.
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- Myriam Duenas
- 05-09-24
Outstanding
This is a very unique and very well written book. This provides a much needed voice to a very complex issue. Kudos to the author for having the courage to do the research and heart to writing this book.
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- Anonymous User
- 12-16-24
Good, a little self indulgent
That’s really it. The subject is important and the narrative is compelling, but sometimes feels too narrative for a research based book. De Leon includes a lot of stuff about his own life which may not all be necessary but it provides inter subjective context.
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- karen brown
- 04-24-25
The knowledge gained. WOW!
This is a world unfamiliar to me. I felt like I was sitting on Jason’s shoulder from the start until the end. The insights have certainly helped me to have greater understanding of another world that is just as real as my privileged world. It reminded me that you cannot know someone’s story by just looking at them. I’m a better person because of this book.
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- Shane
- 12-02-24
Important Work on Human Smugglers
I devoured this book in three days. When I want my dog to take medicine, I will often wrap the pill in a piece of meat. Jason de Leon has essentially done this by grounding his ethnographic theoretical framework in a compelling narrative on the forces and social constructs that shape coyotes. You almost forget that it is an academic work at its core. It would be easiest just to say human smugglers are bad and call it a day, but de Leon provides a thoughtful and disturbing portrait of human smugglers and the circumstances shaping them. Like Oliver Twist who was shaped by an ugly society and the Industrial Revolution, guias are simultaneously victims and criminals taking what agency and control they can muster in the face of forces they themselves are struggling to understand. Oliver Twist escaped via the conventions of a fictional world, Kingston, Flaco, and Chino don't have that luxury and for that reason, you should spend a little time getting to know them. We all have some complicity in these forces. Jason de Leon rocks as the narrator especially since the text incorporates a lot of Spanish slang which requires some deftness.
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- Annie Lawrence
- 04-05-24
You must read this book!
Eye opening book on what migrants have to go through in search of a better life.
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