
Smoke and Ashes
Opium's Hidden Histories
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Narrated by:
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Ranjit Madgavkar
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By:
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Amitav Ghosh
About this listen
Ghosh unravels the impact of the opium trade on global history and in his own family—the climax of a years long project.
When Amitav Ghosh began the research for his monumental cycle of novels the Ibis trilogy ten years ago, he was startled to learn how the lives of the nineteenth-century sailors and soldiers he wrote about were dictated not only by the currents of the Indian Ocean but also by the precious commodity carried in enormous quantities on those currents: opium. Most surprising of all, however, was the discovery that his own identity and family history were swept up in the story.
Smoke and Ashes is at once a travelogue, a memoir, and an essay in history, drawing on decades of archival research. In it, Ghosh traces the transformative effect the opium trade had on Britain, India, and China, as well as the world at large. The trade was engineered by the British Empire, which exported Indian opium to sell to China to redress their great trade imbalance, and its revenues were essential to the empire’s financial survival.
Tracing the profits further, Ghosh finds opium at the origins of some of the world’s biggest corporations, of America’s most powerful families and prestigious institutions (from the Astors and Coolidges to the Ivy League), and of contemporary globalism itself.
Moving deftly between horticultural histories, the mythologies of capitalism, and the repercussions of colonialism, Ghosh reveals the role that one small plant had in making our world, now teetering on the edge of catastrophe.
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By: Ken Liu
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The Calcutta Chromosome
- A Novel of Fevers, Delirium & Discovery
- By: Amitav Ghosh
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 7 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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From Victorian India to near-future New York, The Calcutta Chromosome takes listeners on a wondrous journey through time as a computer programmer trapped in a mind-numbing job hits upon a curious item that will forever change his life. When Antar discovers the battered I.D. card of a long-lost acquaintance, he is suddenly drawn into a spellbinding adventure across centuries and around the globe, into the strange life of L. Murugan....
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Whaaa?
- By Tiffany on 01-07-11
By: Amitav Ghosh
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In an Antique Land
- History in the Guise of a Traveler's Tale
- By: Amitav Ghosh
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 9 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Once upon a time an Indian writer name Amitav Ghosh set out to find an Indian slave, name unknown, who some 700 years before had traveled to the Middle East. The journey took him to a small village in Egypt, where medieval customs coexist with 20th-century desires and discontents. But even as Ghosh sought to re-create the life of his Indian predecessor, he found himself immersed in those of his modern Egyptian neighbors.
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Mixed Worlds
- By Roger on 10-26-10
By: Amitav Ghosh
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The Second Shot
- A Green Beret's Last Mission
- By: Gene Yu
- Narrated by: Feodor Chin
- Length: 7 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Evelyn Chang and her husband were vacationing in the Philippines when they were ambushed by terrorists. Evelyn’s husband was killed. She was kidnapped and disappeared into the lawless netherworld of the Sulu Archipelago. There was no hope of a rescue. Former Green Beret Gene Yu was five years out of the military, unemployed, and struggling with his transition back to the real world when Evelyn’s family asked for help. His improbable mission: infiltrate one of the most dangerous corners of the world and get her back. Alone.
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Great story
- By Amazon Customer on 12-26-24
By: Gene Yu
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Raiders, Rulers, and Traders
- The Horse and the Rise of Empires
- By: David Chaffetz
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 13 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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No animal is so entangled in human history as the horse. The thread starts in prehistory, with a slight, shy animal, hunted for food. Domesticating the horse allowed early humans to settle the vast Eurasian steppe; later, their horses enabled new forms of warfare, encouraged long-distance trade routes, and ended up acquiring deep cultural and religious significance.
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The authors love of his material
- By Jim7 on 05-02-25
By: David Chaffetz
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Exhibit
- A Novel
- By: R. O. Kwon
- Narrated by: Ami Park, Sue Jean Kim
- Length: 5 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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At a lavish party in the hills outside of San Francisco, Jin Han meets Lidija Jung and nothing will ever be the same for either woman. A brilliant young photographer, Jin is at a crossroads in her work, in her marriage to her college love Philip, and in who she is and who she wants to be. Lidija is an alluring, injured world-class ballerina on hiatus from her ballet company under mysterious circumstances. Drawn to each other by their intense artistic drives, the two women talk all night.
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Not my cup of tea
- By Chad on 06-17-25
By: R. O. Kwon
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The Mermaid from Jeju
- By: Sumi Hahn
- Narrated by: Cindy Kay, Raymond J. Lee
- Length: 8 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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In the aftermath of World War II, Goh Junja is a girl just coming into her own. She is the latest successful deep-sea diver in her family. She urges her mother to allow her to make their annual trip to Mt. Halla, where they trade sea delicacies for pork. A sea-village girl, Junja has never been to the mountains, where it smells like mushrooms and earth, and it is there she falls in love with mountain-boy Yang Suwol. But when Junja returns one day later, it is just in time to see her mother take her last breath, beaten by the waves during a dive she was taking in Junja's place.
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Male reader ruins the book
- By Shana Theobald on 06-01-23
By: Sumi Hahn
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Miss Kim Knows
- And Other Stories
- By: Cho Nam-joo, Jamie Chang - translator
- Narrated by: Mei Mei Macleod
- Length: 5 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Written in Cho Nam-joo’s signature razor-sharp prose, Miss Kim Knows follows eight women as they confront how gender shapes and orders their lives. A woman is born. A woman is filmed in public without consent. A woman is gaslit. A woman is discriminated against at work. A woman grows old. A woman becomes famous. A woman is hated, and loved, and then hated again. As with Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, these microcosmic stories prove eerily relatable under Cho Nam-joo’s precise, unveiled gaze, offering another captivating read from an essential voice in fiction.
By: Cho Nam-joo, and others
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Opium
- A History
- By: Martin Booth
- Narrated by: Julian Elfer
- Length: 13 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Known to mankind since prehistoric times, opium is arguably the oldest and most widely used narcotic. Opium: A History traces the drug's astounding impact on world culture - from its religious use by prehistoric peoples to its influence on the imaginations of the Romantic writers; from the earliest medical science to the Sino-British opium wars.
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GREAT SUMMARY, WELL READ
- By Aidan on 01-21-20
By: Martin Booth
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The Circle of Reason
- By: Amitav Ghosh
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 14 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Amitav Ghosh’s extraordinary first novel makes a claim on literary turf held by Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie. In a vivid and magical story, The Circle of Reason traces the misadventures of Alu, a young master weaver in a small Bengali village who is falsely accused of terrorism. Alu flees his home, traveling through Bombay to the Persian Gulf to North Africa with a bird-watching policeman in pursuit.
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Ghosh, I was disappointed
- By Gwen Urey on 03-04-13
By: Amitav Ghosh
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Medieval Horizons
- Why the Middle Ages Matter
- By: Ian Mortimer
- Narrated by: Ian Mortimer
- Length: 10 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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We tend to think of the Middle Ages as a dark, backward, and unchanging time characterized by violence, ignorance, and superstition. By contrast, we believe progress arose from science and technological innovation, and that inventions of recent centuries created the modern world. We couldn't be more wrong.
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Altered my perception of History
- By IowaGreyhound on 06-25-24
By: Ian Mortimer
Clarifies myths and exposes the real history of the narco-state the British set up in India.
Reader is great but there are many words he pronounces in Indian English that grated on me bcz of their unfamiliar/odd pronunciation. eg, entrepreneur, assuage, etc
Gripping history of opium trade
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a must read
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I would have liked to be able to enjoy the the text but unfortunately, the narrator has chosen to insert himself into the telling in a most irritating way. He seems to feel the need to dramatize and comment on the emotional content of his text, even when - particularly when - there is no need to do so. He slows down and emphasizes certain passages with slow, labored attention to each word in some passages, then speeds up and passes quickly over others, but there is no rhyme or reason to it. Letters from one person to another are particularly painful exercises in bad acting.
It got to the point that I could only listen in short bursts, sometimes no longer than a few minutes before the narration got so infuriating that I would have to stop. Again, a real shame as I generally enjoy the sweep of Ghosh's histories, as for example in his The Nutmeg's Curse.
A very interesting book ruined by bad narration
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Poor performance
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Good pacing and emotive but not overdone at all.
I adored the narrator
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There is a fair amount towards the end that will be hit or miss. I guess if you have read his other books it might be some interesting insight, but was largely wasted on me.
Follow the poppy as it builds and destroys empires
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Interesting Research, Terrible Reading
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Eye opening discussion of worldwide opium trade.
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a distinguished book on a topic generally unexplored
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Amid the dense thickets of details, it's hard to remain interested in the terrible history of opium and how it was used against the poor people who were forced to grow it and the colonized people who were encouraged to destroy themselves using it.
I listened to the book in my car and found myself constantly having to raise and reduce the volume because of the narrator's irritating habit of starting out a sentence loudly, then sinking into a half-whisper part way through. I would have stopped listening if it weren't my book group's most recent selection.
Dull story, poorly narrated
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