A Billion Years: My Escape from a Life in the Highest Ranks of Scientology

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Hubbard noted in one of his policy letters that the hardest thing to see is that which is omitted, and this sums up the official scientology 'biography' of Hubbard. Michael Pollan, known for his best-selling nonfiction audio, including The Omnivores Dilemma and How to Change Your Mind, conceived and wrote Caffeine: How Caffeine Created the Modern World as an Audible Original. I read Mike Rinder's autobiography only because I was informed that once again he could not restrain his obsession for lying about me and my family. Instead, it ruled that in the single case in front of the court there was an insufficiency of evidence to reverse the IRS's deduction denial.

I imagine it must be simply "thrilling" and "intoxicating" being at the "pinnacle of achievement," "front and center in the crowd" (sandwiched between Toby McGuire and Alec Baldwin no less).

He also believed that the new government there, which had recently broken ties with Britain, would be sympathetic to his own problems with the establishment.

He did a great job showing us how indoctrinated one can be, how utterly convinced one can be of doing the right thing, forging forward through all the mud, because one is trying to save humanity.

It was a tactic famously used by Stalin - keep your subordinates divided, fearful, confused, and off-balance. He then claims that the result of the investigation - in fact performed by others - "the hope of getting the IRS to back off was dashed. Former Scientologist, Jon Atack, found the registrations with Hubbard's signatures on for 'The Church Of American Science'; the 'Church of Scientology'; and the 'Church of Human Engineering'.

Imagine that from the first moment you could comprehend words being spoken, you were told that if you travelled outside the wall around the house in which you were born, a terrible fate would befall you.

In the four years since most of that material has been publicly available, no one from ASC has attempted to refute a single word of it. This was a fascinating look at Mike Rinder's personal story in Scientology and definitely worth reading. Everything outside the isolated world of scientology was invalid and could be bent to the will of the 'most ethical beings in the universe.

But for entertainment purposes, also because I really can't understand why someone would ever want to be in this cult and all the extreme events, I'm giving this 4 stars. For Arthur Dent, who has only just had his house demolished that morning, this seems already to be more than he can cope with.

Mike Rinder has written the definitive book on the great threat of Scientology in the twenty-first century. The whole organisation is run by a madman whose word is law, who doesn't seem to mind who or what he destroys along the way.