LAWRENCE WRIGHT - Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

Monday, January 28 at 7PM

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author
LAWRENCE WRIGHT
speaking & signing
Going Clear: Scientology,
Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

The speaking portion of this event is free and open to the public. Tickets are required for the signing portion of the event and are available only with the purchase of a copy of Going Clear from BookPeople. Books & tickets are now available for in-store and via our website. Purchasing the book automatically assigns you a ticket for the signing. 

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower comes this extraordinary investigation into the inner workings of the Church of Scientology, based on more than two hundred personal interviews with both current and former Scientologists—both famous and less well known—and years of archival research.

At the book’s center are two men: The darkly brilliant science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, and his successor, David Miscavige. We learn about Scientology’s complicated cosmology. We see the ways in which the church pursues celebrities and how such stars are used to advance the church’s goals. We meet the young idealists who have joined the Sea Org, the church’s clergy, signing up with a billion-year contract. In Going Clear, Wright examines what fundamentally makes a religion a religion, and whether Scientology is, in fact, deserving of this constitutional protection.

Lawrence Wright is a graduate of Tulane University and the American University in Cairo, where he spent two years teaching. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker, and the author of six previous books of nonfiction—City Children, Country Summer; In the New World; Saints and Sinners; Remembering Satan; and The Looming Tower—and a novel, God’s Favorite. He received many honors for The Looming Tower, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism, among others. He is also a screenwriter and a playwright. He and his wife are longtime residents of Austin, Texas. Learn more about Lawrence Wright on his website, http://www.lawrencewright.com