New Kings of the World

Dispatches from Bollywood, Dizi, and K-Pop

By: Fatima Bhutto

Narrated by: Soneela Nankani

A lively, inside look at how Bollywood, Turkish soap operas, and K-Pop are challenging America's cultural dominance around the world.

There is a vast cultural movement emerging from beyond the Western world. Truly global in its range and allure, it is the biggest challenge yet to Hollywood, McDonald's, and blue jeans. This is an audiobook about these new arbiters of mass culture arising from the East--India's Bollywood films, Turkish soap opera, or dizi, and South Korean pop music. Carefully packaging not always secular modernity with traditional values in urbanized settings, they have created a new global pop culture that can be easily consumed, especially by the many millions coming late to the modern world and still negotiating its overwhelming challenges.

Acclaimed author Fatima Bhutto profiles Shah Rukh Khan, by many measures the most popular movie star in the world; goes behind the scenes of Magnificent Century, Turkey's biggest TV show, watched by upwards of 200 million people across 43 countries; and travels to South Korea to see how K-Pop started it all, and how "Gangnam Style" became the first YouTube video with one billion views.

Interesting book

The book is very well written and an enjoyable read. I wish they’d chosen a narrator who was fluent in Urdu-Hindi too in additionally to English. The narrator was pronouncing words of Urdu-Hindi will alot of discomfort.

Butchered urdu and hindi words from the narrator

Timely analysis of the current media landscape and the current pop culture zeitgeist with no allusions.