
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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- 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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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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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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Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here
- The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis
- By: Jonathan Blitzer
- Narrated by: Jonathan Blitzer, André Santana
- Length: 18 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Everyone who makes the journey faces an impossible choice. Hundreds of thousands of people who arrive every year at the US-Mexico border travel far from their homes. For years, the majority came from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, but many more have begun their journey much farther away. Some flee persecution, others crime or hunger. They may have already been deported, but the United States remains their only hope for safety and prosperity. They will take their chances.
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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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The Hidden Globe
- How Wealth Hacks the World
- By: Atossa Araxia Abrahamian
- Narrated by: Patrick Harrison
- Length: 12 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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A globe shows the world we think we know: neatly delineated sovereign nations that grant or restrict their citizens’ rights. Beneath, above, and tucked inside their borders, however, another universe has been engineered into existence. It consists of thousands of extraterritorial zones that operate largely autonomously, and increasingly for the benefit of the wealthiest individuals and corporations. Atossa Abrahamian traces the rise of this hidden globe to thirteenth-century Switzerland, where poor cantons marketed their only commodity.
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why a male narrator?
- By catriona on 12-27-24
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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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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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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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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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Our Migrant Souls
- A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”
- By: Héctor Tobar
- Narrated by: André Santana
- Length: 7 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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"Latino" is the most open-ended and loosely defined of the major race categories in the United States. Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of "Latino" assembles the Pulitzer Prize winner Héctor Tobar's personal experiences as the son of Guatemalan immigrants and the stories told to him by his Latinx students to offer a spirited rebuke to racist ideas about Latino people.
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Plays in the idea of “we are the victims.”
- By Luis F. Ruiz on 02-15-24
By: Héctor Tobar
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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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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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The Rent Collectors
- Exploitation, Murder, and Redemption in Immigrant LA
- By: Jesse Katz
- Narrated by: Jesse Katz
- Length: 10 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Baby-faced teen Giovanni Macedo is desperate to find belonging in one of LA's most predatory gangs, the Columbia Lil Cycos—so desperate that he agrees to kill an undocumented Mexican street vendor. The vendor, Francisco Clemente, had been refusing to give in to the gang's shakedown demands. But Giovanni botches the hit, accidentally killing a newborn instead. The overlords who rule the Lil Cycos from a Supermax prison 1,000 miles away must be placated and Giovanni is lured across the border where, in turn, the gang botches his killing.
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Real, raw, and breathtaking
- By Raul on 04-30-25
By: Jesse Katz
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LatinoLand
- A Portrait of America's Largest and Least Understood Minority
- By: Marie Arana
- Narrated by: Cynthia Farrell
- Length: 18 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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LatinoLand is an exceptional, all-encompassing overview of Hispanic America based on personal interviews, deep research, and Marie Arana’s life experience as a Latina. At present, Latinos comprise twenty percent of the US population, a number that is growing. By 2050, census reports project that one in every three Americans will claim Latino heritage.
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If you’re searching for the truth, this may not be your resource. Had children
- By Melissa L. Cook on 09-17-24
By: Marie Arana
Gritty and raw
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Astonishing and moving
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Non-fiction that readslike a novel
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Vivid characters with tragic backstories.
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Humanizes our neighbors to the south when it would be easy to just listen to myopic and over simplified news bites!
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Outstanding
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Good, a little self indulgent
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The knowledge gained. WOW!
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Honest and enlightening
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Learn
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