Audiobooks narrated by Sean Rohani

Coleman Barks (Author), Sean Rohani (Narrator)

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Book of Queens: The True Story of the Middle Eastern Horsewomen Who Fought the War on Terror

The untold story of generations of Middle Eastern freedom fighters-horsewomen who safeguarded an ancient breed of Caspian horse-and their efforts to defend their homelands from the Taliban and others seeking to destroy them."A breathtaking book that revisits nearly one hundred years of Iranian history, highlighting the power and beauty of women who refuse to be subdued." ―Alison Hawthorne Deming, author of A Woven World Book of Queens reaches back centuries to the Persian Empire and a woman disguised as a man, facing an invading army, protected only by light armor and the stallion she sat astride. Mahdavi draws a thread from past to present: from her fearless Iranian grandmother, who guided survivors of domestic violence to independent mountain colonies in Afghanistan where the women, led by a general named Mina, became their country's first line of defense from marauding warlords. To the female warriors who helped train and breed the horses used by US Green Berets when they touched down in October 2001, with a mission but insufficient intelligence on the ground-women whose contributions were then forgotten. Pardis Mahdavi chases the legacy of Caspian horses and the women whose lives are saved by them, drawing on decades of research, newly-discovered diaries, and exclusive military sources. Among those intersecting stories is that of American Louise Firouz, who helped bring the breed back from the brink of extinction, connecting Virginia traders to British royals to the son of the Shah. Firouz's life is forever changed when she meets Mahdavi's own family, who run an unusual smuggling operation in addition to raising horses in a wild bid for freedom. Book of Queens is an epic tale of hidden women whose communal knowledge was instrumental in saving an animal as ancient as civilization, and who were the genesis of their own liberation.

Pardis Mahdavi (Author), Nikki Massoud, Pardis Mahdavi, Sean Rohani, Shila Ommi, Sitara Attaie, Suzanne Toren (Narrator)

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Six Questions of Socrates: A Modern-Day Journey of Discovery through World Philosophy

How people around the world grapple with the great questions posed by Socrates. What is virtue? What is moderation? What is justice? What is courage? What is good? What is piety? Socrates thought that understanding the perspectives of others on these six great questions would help him become a more excellent human being. Following in Socrates's footsteps, Christopher Phillips—'Johnny Appleseed with a master's degree' (Utne Reader)—investigates these same questions, beginning in the marketplace of modern-day Athens. He goes on to investigate the timely responses and outlooks of people from different cultures and backgrounds around the world: from Greece and Spain to Japan and Korea, Mexico City, and Chiapas, where the region's indigenous people struggle for fundamental human rights. Phillips also traveled throughout the United States, holding dialogues in diverse communities from New York City to the Navajo Nation. Introducing us to less familiar thinkers in non-Western traditions who were kindred spirits of Socrates, Phillips enlarges our perspectives on life's fundamental questions, creating an innovative world survey of philosophy.

Christopher Phillips (Author), Sean Rohani (Narrator)

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Socrates in Love: Philosophy for a Die-hard Romantic

A breakout book completing a trilogy of Socratic exploration by the inimitable Johnny Appleseed of philosophy. Christopher Phillips goes to the heart of philosophy and Socratic discourse to discover what we're all looking for: the kind of love that makes life worthwhile. Love here is not defined only or even primarily as eros, but in all its classic varietiesfrom love of family and love of neighbor to love of country, love of God, love of life, and love of wisdom. Phillips's explorations take us from New Orleans at Mardi Gras and the gambling dens of Las Vegas to the last evangelical revival presided over by Billy Graham. He talks with moms and dads about 'parent love,' with inmates of a maximum-security prison about 'unconditional love,' with Hurricane Katrina refugees and a family who took them in, and with Japanese seniors and schoolchildren in Hiroshima Peace Park. Throughout, he enriches his dialogues with commentary on the great philosophers of love from the ancients to Rumi to Ayn Rand and Anais Nin.

Christopher Phillips (Author), Sean Rohani (Narrator)

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Jackie & Me

"ABSOLUTELY IRRESISTIBLE." -People In 1951, former debutante Jacqueline Bouvier is hard at work as the Inquiring Camera Girl for a Washington newspaper. Her mission in life is "not to be a housewife," but when she meets the charismatic congressman Jack Kennedy at a Georgetown party, her resolution begins to falter. Soon the two are flirting over secret phone calls, cocktails, and dinner dates, and as Jackie is drawn deeper into the Kennedy orbit, and as Jack himself grows increasingly elusive and absent, she begins to question what life at his side would mean. For answers, she turns to his best friend and confidant, Lem Billings, a closeted gay man who has made the Kennedy family his own, and who has been instructed by them to seal the deal with Jack's new girl. But as he gets to know her, a deep and touching friendship emerges, leaving him with painfully divided alliances and a troubling dilemma: Is this the marriage she deserves? Narrated by an older Lem as he looks back at his own role in a complicated alliance, this is a courtship story full of longing and of suspense, of what-ifs and possible wrong turns. It is a surprising look at Jackie before she was that Jackie. And in best-selling author Louis Bayard's witty and deeply empathetic telling, Jackie & Me is a page-turning story of friendship, love, sacrifice, and betrayal- and a fresh take on two iconic American figures.

Louis Bayard (Author), Sean Rohani (Narrator)

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Layli and Majnun

The Persian epic that inspired Eric Clapton's unforgettable love song 'Layla' and that Lord Byron called 'the Romeo and Juliet of the East,' in a masterly new translation The iconic love story of the Middle East, by a twelfth-century Persian poet who has been compared to Shakespeare for his subtlety, inventiveness, and dramatic force, Layli and Majnun tells of star-crossed lovers whose union is tragically thwarted by their families and whose passion continues to ripple out across the centuries. Theirs is a love that lasts a lifetime, and in Nezami's immortal telling, erotic longing blends with spiritual self-denial in an allegory of Sufi aspiration, as the amenities of civilization give way to the elemental wilderness, desire is sublimated into a mystical renunciation of the physical world, and the soul confronts its essence. This is a tour de force of Persian literature, in a translation that captures the extraordinary power and virtuosity of the original. This audiobook includes a PDF that contains notes from the book.

Nezami Ganjavi (Author), Dick Davis, Peter Ganim, Sean Rohani, Serena Manteghi (Narrator)

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Out of Mesopotamia

Saleh Abdoh, the narrator of Out of Mesopotamia, is a middle-aged Iranian journalist who moonlights as a writer for one of Iran's most popular TV shows, but cannot keep himself away from the front lines in neighboring Iraq and Syria. There, the fight against the Islamic State is a proxy war, an existential battle, a declaration of faith, and, for some, a passing weekend affair.After weeks spent dodging RPGs and witnessing acts of savagery and stupidity, Saleh returns to his civilian life of Tehran bookstore readings and trendy art openings and finds it to be an unbearably dislocating experience. Pursued by the woman who broke his heart, his official handler from state security (who wants him for questioning over a suspicious volume of Proust), and the screenwriters with whom he is supposed to be collaborating, Saleh has reason to flee again from everyday life-but not necessarily to discard it. Surrounded by men whose willingness to achieve martyrdom both fascinates and appalls him, Saleh struggles to make sense of himself and the turmoil that surrounds him.An unprecedented glimpse into the fight against the Islamic State from a Middle Eastern perspective, Out of Mesopotamia follows in the tradition of the Western canon of martial writers, but then subverts and expands upon it before completely blowing it apart. Drawing on firsthand experience, it gives agency to the voiceless while offering a meditation on war that is moving, humane, darkly funny, and resonantly true.

Salar Abdoh (Author), Sean Rohani (Narrator)

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Lean Against This Late Hour

A vivid, affecting portrait of life in the shadow of violence and loss, for readers of both English and Persian The first selection of poems by renowned Iranian poet Garous Abdolmalekian to appear in English, this collection is a mesmerizing, disorienting descent into the trauma of loss and its aftermath. In spare lines, Abdolmalekian conjures surreal, cinematic images that pan wide as deftly as they narrow into intimate focus. Time is a thread come unspooled: pain arrives before the wound, and the dead wait for sunrise. Abdolmalekian resists definitive separations between cause and effect, life and death, or heaven and hell, and challenges our sense of what is fixed and what is unsettled and permeable. Though the speakers in these poems are witnesses to the deforming effects of grief and memory, they remain alive to curiosity, to the pleasure of companionship, and to other ways of being and seeing. Lean Against This Late Hour illuminates the images we conjure in the face of abandonment and ruin, and finds them by turns frightening, bewildering, ethereal, and defiant. 'This time,' a disembodied voice commands, 'send us a prophet who only listens.'

Garous Abdolmalekian (Author), Sean Rohani (Narrator)

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Audiobooks Narrated by Sean Rohani