Shane Bauer

In 2014, Shane Bauer was hired for $9 an hour to work as an entry-level prison guard at a private prison in Winnfield, Louisiana. An award-winning investigative journalist, he used his real name; In American Prison, Bauer weaves a much deeper reckoning with his experiences together with a thoroughly researched history of for-profit prisons in America from their origins in the decades before the Civil War. For, as he soon realized, we can't understand the cruelty of our current system and its place in the larger story of mass incarceration without understanding where it came from. Private prisons became entrenched in the South as part of a systemic effort to keep the African-American labor force in place in the aftermath of slavery, and the echoes of these shameful origins are with us still.

Hikers held captive in Tehran tell their story in “a moving memoir by three individuals who found the strength to survive” (San Jose Mercury News). During the summer of 2009, Shane Bauer, Joshua Fattal, and Sarah Shourd were hiking in the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan when they unknowingly crossed into Iran and were captured by border patrol. Wrongly accused of espionage, the three Americans ultimately found themselves in Tehran’s infamous Evin Prison, where activists and protesters from the Green Movement were still being confined and tortured. Cut off from the world and trapped in a legal black hole, the three friends discovered that pooling their strength of will and relying on one another was the only way they could survive. In A Sliver of Light, Bauer, Fattal, and Shourd finally get to tell their side of the story. They offer a rare glimpse inside Iran at a time when understanding this fractured state has never been more important. But beyond that, this memoir is a profoundly humane account of defiance, hope, and the elemental power of friendship—and a “ record of a human rights triumph” (San Jose Mercury News).

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/...

Robert F. Kennedy Book Award winner and author of NYTBR Top Ten Book of the Year AMERICAN PRISON Shane Bauer's untitled work on Americans in Syria, which comes out of his current cover story in Mother Jones, based on his travels to Syria to get firsthand exposure to the war that has killed more than 500,000 people and displaced 12 million, to illuminate the role that the U.S. has played through the interconnected stories of a number of Americans involved in the conflict and Syrians whose lives have been impacted, to Scott Moyers at Penguin Press.