Audiobooks narrated by Keval Shah

Driven by the Monsoons: Through the Indian Ocean and the Seas of China

The Silk Road may be one origin of globalization, but the Indian Ocean is another. Barry Cunliffe examines the beginning of maritime trade using the evidence of archaeology and the tales of great travelers such as Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta, and the Chinese Admiral, Zheng He. This story complements that of the land routes, showing how humans have been driven across thousands of years to create and maintain networks whatever the difficulties. Driven by the Monsoons illuminates maritime connections between the Indian Ocean and its surrounding water routes: the Arabian Gulf and the Red and China Seas. It begins with the movement of humans into South-East Asia and ends about 1600 CE when European companies emerge to takeover. It is tale of exotic goods, material needs, adventure, and desire. While conditions at sea and the abilities of the maritime communities provided a degree of stability, the direction and intensity of trade and the types of commodities on the move was determined by the fortunes and aspirations of distant empires, those of China in the east and South-West Asia and the Mediterranean in the west. This ever-changing pressure provided the dynamic situation in which society and economies in East Africa, India, and South-East Asia flourished. Driven by the Monsoons explores the birth of the modern, connected, world.

Barry Cunliffe (Author), Keval Shah (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Psychic Lives of Statues: Reckoning with the Rubble of Empire

Statues around the world have become lightning rods for public debates over the meaning of our imperial past and postcolonial present. The Psychic Lives of Statues is an insightful exploration of these global controversies, demonstrating that beneath their surface lie deeper struggles over race, caste, and the politics of decolonization. Rahul Rao takes listeners on an international journey, revealing how these controversies have dramatically rearranged anticolonial political thought through the multifaceted lenses of justice, cultural memory, and belonging. The Psychic Lives of Statues explores both the toppling of colonial statues and the erection of postcolonial ones, illuminating how statues remain powerful and compelling forms of memorialization. Engaging with artists, scholars, and activists, Rao offers a fresh and exciting perspective on how we understand our past and present through iconography.

Rahul Rao (Author), Keval Shah (Narrator)

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Oxford Handbook of the International Monetary Fund

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is a pivotal institution in global economic governance tasked with ensuring monetary stability and preventing financial crises through promoting balanced trade, economic growth, and poverty reduction. It also plays a powerful normative role by shaping economic policies worldwide through its research and expertise. The IMF played a crucial role in managing crises like the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, providing significant financial aid and advocating for stimulus measures. However, the IMF faces both internal and external challenges from reforming its governance structure to better represent emerging economies to finding its place in a world increasingly defying liberal internationalism and multilateralism. Despite reforms, power remains concentrated among advanced economies, hindering inclusivity and trust, particularly in regions like sub-Saharan Africa. Geopolitical tensions, populist nationalism, and economic imbalances further strain the IMF's effectiveness. This handbook aims to uncover these challenges by providing diverse perspectives and proposing policy recommendations that the Fund could undertake to better navigate the complex landscape of twenty-first-century global governance.

TBD (Author), Keval Shah (Narrator)

Audiobook

The World Is Your Office: How Work from Anywhere Boosts Talent, Productivity, and Innovation

As the debate around remote versus in-office work rages on, leaders in a wide range of industries continue to implement radically flexible work practices, allowing most, if not all, of their employees to work from anywhere. Why? They understand that geographic flexibility offers a competitive advantage: the ability to attract and retain top talent globally. In The World Is Your Office, Harvard Business School professor Prithwiraj Choudhury, who has been studying this phenomenon for over a decade, takes listeners inside the trailblazing companies that are going all-in on work-from-anywhere (WFA) policies. From startups and nonprofits to government agencies and large corporations, Choudhury's research shows why and how these organizations are benefiting. Drawing insights from this pioneering research, Choudhury also provides an extensive playbook for implementing successful WFA policies, offering leaders concrete strategies to use WFA as a means of hiring and retaining the best talent; effectively manage WFA teams, share knowledge, and combat isolation; leverage AI and automation to extend WFA into manufacturing and other deskless roles; and design programs that attract talent to different regions. Filled with actionable insights and extensive case studies, The World Is Your Office empowers leaders to embrace the future of work.

Prithwiraj Choudhury (Author), Keval Shah (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Great Betrayal: The Struggle for Freedom and Democracy in the Middle East

The Middle East is in upheaval: a widening chasm between state and society, the failure of governing elites to address citizens' genuine grievances, massive economic mismanagement—all made worse by repeated interventions by Western powers. Why has political change been so difficult to achieve? In The Great Betrayal, Fawaz Gerges argues that the convergence of political authoritarianism, meddling by the West, and the effects of prolonged regional conflicts have produced political paralysis and economic stagnation. The agency of everyday people has been thwarted by an authoritarian status quo that is maintained by a powerful partnership of external and internal forces. Gerges traces more than a century of consequential events in the region, from the end of the Ottoman Empire and the European carve-up of the Middle East to the Iranian Revolution and the Arab Spring uprisings. He shows how the people of the Middle East have been systematically denied self-determination, political representation, and effective government. What can we learn from the Middle East's vexed history? Gerges is optimistic, declaring that the region's future will be determined not by dictators and their superpower patrons but by a growing population of Arab and Muslim youth who demand to be treated as citizens and not as subjects.

Fawaz A. Gerges (Author), Keval Shah (Narrator)

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Subjugate the Earth: The Beginning and End of Human Domination of Nature

Subjugate the Earth traces the biography of a strange idea: the idea that human beings can subdue nature and rule over it. Born in Mesopotamia at the dawn of civilization, the idea of subjugating the Earth was included in the Bible, reached Europe through Christianity, and spread through colonialism. The Enlightenment gave a scientific appearance to the ambition of controlling nature but did not change the ambition itself. Yet every birth presages a death. Only with the climate crisis has it become apparent that the subjugation of nature must be a self-defeating ambition, because it alters and deregulates natural systems which humans depend on for survival, precisely because they are part of nature. Subjugating the Earth is an idea that is dying around us. The polycrisis threatening to engulf humanity is inextricably linked to how humans see themselves and their relationship with nature. Based on developments in the natural sciences, a new understanding of this relationship looks not at individual phenomena but at systems, connections, and entanglements between humans and other manifestations of nature. Is it possible to build a new understanding of humanity in nature by turning the traditional vision of free, rational individuals on its head and seeing humans as fascinating, irrational and system-dependent beings within the vast system of nature?

Philipp Blom (Author), Keval Shah (Narrator)

Audiobook

The House Divided: Sunni, Shia and the Making of the Middle East

At the heart of the Middle East, with its regional conflicts and proxy wars, is a 1400-year-old schism between Sunni and Shia. To understand this divide and its modern resonances, we need to revisit its origins—which go back to the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632; the accidental coup that set aside the claims of his son Ali; and the slaughter of Ali's own son Husayn at Karbala. These events, known to every Muslim, have created a slender fault line in the Middle East. The House Divided follows these narratives from the first Sunni and Shia caliphates through the medieval empires of the Arabs, Persians, and Ottomans to the contemporary Middle East. It shows how a complex range of identities and rivalries—religious, ethnic, and national—have shaped the region, jolted by the seismic shift of the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Rogerson's original approach takes the modern chessboard of nation states and looks at each through its particular history of empires and occupiers, minorities and resources, sheikhs and imams. The result is wide-ranging empathy, understanding, and insight—a book that is vital for anyone wishing to understand many of the current tensions in the Middle East today.

Barnaby Rogerson (Author), Keval Shah (Narrator)

Audiobook

How to Lose a War: The Story of America's Intervention on Afghanistan

Amin Saikal (Author), Keval Shah, TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Archive of Empire: Knowledge, Conquest, and the Making of the Early Modern British World

How modern data-driven government originated in the creation and use of administrative archives in the British Empire Over the span of two hundred years, Great Britain established, governed, lost, and reconstructed an empire that embraced three continents and two oceanic worlds. The British ruled this empire by correlating incoming information about the conduct of subjects and aliens in imperial spaces with norms of good governance developed in London. Officials derived these norms by studying the histories of government contained in the official records of both the state and corporations and located in repositories known as archives. As the empire expanded in both the Americas and India, however, this system of political knowledge came to be regarded as inadequate in governing the non-English people who inhabited the lands over which the British asserted sovereignty. This posed a key problem for imperial officials: What kind of knowledge was required to govern an empire populated by a growing number of culturally different people? Using files, pens, and paper, the British defined the information order of the modern state as they debated answers to this question. In tracing the rise and deployment of archives in early modern British imperial rule, Asheesh Kapur Siddique uncovers the origins of our data-driven present.

Asheesh Kapur Siddique (Author), Keval Shah (Narrator)

Audiobook

Empire's Son, Empire's Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah

In literary circles of the mid-twentieth century, father and son, Ikbal and Idries Shah, spread seductive accounts of a mystical Middle East. Pitching themselves as the authentic voice of the Muslim world, they penned travelogues and exotic potboilers alongside weighty tomes on Islam and politics. Above all, father and son told Western readers what they wanted to hear: audacious yarns of eastern adventure and harmless Sufi mystics-myths that, as the century wore on and the Taliban seized power, became increasingly detached from reality. This book follows the Shahs from their origins in colonial India to literary London, wartime Oxford, and counterculture California via the Levant, the League of Nations, and Latin America. Nile Green unravels the conspiracies and pseudonyms, fantastical pasts and self-aggrandizing anecdotes, high stakes and bold schemes that for nearly a century painted the defining portrait of Afghanistan. Ikbal and Idries convinced poets, spies, orientalists, diplomats, occultists, hippies, and even a prime minister that they held the key to understanding the Islamic world. From George Orwell directing Muslim propaganda to Robert Graves translating a fake manuscript of Omar Khayyam and Doris Lessing supporting jihad, Green tells the fascinating tale of how the book world was beguiled by the dream of an Afghan Shangri-La that never existed.

Nile Green (Author), Keval Shah (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Little Book of Valuation: How to Value a Company, Pick a Stock, and Profit, Updated Edition

In The Little Book of Valuation: How to Value a Company, Pick a Stock, and Profit, professor and economist Aswath Damodaran guides listeners through the fundamentals and step-by-step process of picking winning companies to invest in. In the book, you'll learn how to make your own accurate valuation assessments, avoiding common pitfalls and mistakes along the way. From widespread misunderstandings to undeniable truths in valuation, the author covers exactly where to turn your attention to when assessing a company's value based on a myriad of factors, with stories and real examples included throughout to prepare you for any modern investing challenge you may find yourself facing. You'll also learn simple but extremely effective valuation tools and formulas for success; the complex relationship between assets, debt, equity, and business value; and special market considerations regarding valuation that require a dynamic approach. Rather than relying on third-party sources-often drawing from the same public information that you have access to, but getting it wrong-The Little Book of Valuation, Updated Edition gives listeners all the insight and practical tools they need to cut through the noise and arrive at their own accurate valuations, pick profitable stocks, and establish successful long-term portfolios.

Aswath Damodaran (Author), Keval Shah (Narrator)

Audiobook

Dreadful

A sharp-witted, debut high fantasy farce featuring killer moat squid, toxic masculinity, evil wizards, and a garlic festival-all at once. It's bad enough waking up in a half-destroyed evil wizard's workshop with no eyebrows, no memories, and no idea how long you have before the Dread Lord Whomever shows up to murder you horribly and then turn your skull into a goblet or something. It's a lot worse when you realize that Dread Lord Whomever is . . . you. Gav isn't really sure how he ended up with a castle full of goblins, or why he has a princess locked in a cell. All he can do is play along with his own evil plan in hopes of getting his memories back before he gets himself killed. But as he realizes that nothing-from the incredibly tasteless cloak adorned with flames to the aforementioned princess-is quite what it seems, Gav must face up to all the things the Dread Lord Gavrax has done. And he'll have to answer the hardest question of all-who does he want to be? A high fantasy farce featuring killer moat squid, toxic masculinity, an evil wizard convocation, and a garlic festival. All at once. All in all, Dread Lord Gavrax has had better weeks.

Caitlin Rozakis (Author), Keval Shah (Narrator)

Audiobook

Audiobooks Narrated by Keval Shah