Hadrian Howard has narrated 5 audiobooks on Listento.it by 2 authors. The most-rated is British Covert Operations in World War I.
The Chicago Police Department
Summary
Today, as one of the biggest cities in the country, Chicago means a lot of different things to different people, but the Windy City, as culturally rich as it is, has long been known for controversial political corruption and its gangster past. While those kinds of crimes are less prominent today, one recent documentary Chiraq provided a new chilling, sobering, and wildly unfortunate sobriquet for the city. For far too many of the city’s youth, the places they call home are just a few steps removed from an actual war zone. According to a 2019 report by CBS News, roughly 1,099 of every 100,000 Chicagoans are likely to experience a violent crime. Records released by the FBI revealed that a staggering 653 people in Chicago were murdered in 2016, surpassing Los Angeles and New York City combined. The obvious dissimilarities between Chicago and a traditional battlefield aside, many experts can relate to the sentiment. BBC correspondent Ian Pannell, for one, described what he saw as striking resemblances: “People live with a threat or elements of danger, and although the degree is completely different, that's similar for civilian populations in both environments. What always amazes me - you see this in Chicago, and you see this in places like Syria - is people, they'll be out on the street, they'll be doing the shopping, but they know the rules. As soon as trouble starts to happen, suddenly, everybody disappears...” Pannell further added, “I've never seen so many weapons in civilian hands outside of a war zone as I did in parts of Chicago. Kids have become desensitized to violence. Someone's been shot, and kids are playing up and down the streets on their bikes, because they're used to seeing it, and that's also what you see in a war zone.” More disturbing yet, veteran gangsters and juvenile street thugs may not be the only ones to blame for this senseless bloodshed. Not only is Chicago consistently nominated each year as one of the deadliest cities in America, the Windy City is infamous for its egregiously problematic police department, whose reputation has been marred by corruption, abuse, and systemic racism, among other kinds of misconduct. A 2019 Fortune report, citing a study conducted by the University of Illinois, found that Chicago's finest were responsible for 82 percent of the corruption convictions in the entire state. The discriminatory tendencies entrenched in Chicago’s police department have undoubtedly become one of the most contentious hot-button issues to divide the city in recent years. Chicagoans and allies from cities near and far demand answers and justice for the number of unarmed black men who have died, such as 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, who, while carrying a folded three-inch blade, was walking away from Officer Jason Van Dyke when he was shot at 16 times. It hasn’t escaped people’s notice that 67 percent of those booked in the Cook County Department of Corrections on a daily basis are black. Of course, the city can be plenty dangerous for the cops, as well. Dozens of Chicago police officers have fallen in the line of duty, such as officers Eduardo Marmolejo and Conrad Gary, who were struck and killed by a train while in pursuit of a suspected gunman. Officers like those two knowingly risk their lives each and every day, both on and off the clock, willing to thrust themselves into danger without a second's hesitation. In late November 2018, Officer Samuel Jimenez was on what would have been an uneventful assignment - mail delivery - when he was apprised by an active shooter at Mercy Hospital. Jimenez hastened to the premises at once in a noble effort to assist the squad dispatched to the scene, and he was shot and killed in the process. On a lighter note, one would be remiss not to acknowledge the endeavors of Officer Jennifer Maddox, one of 10 crowned “Heroes of the Year” by CNN New York in 2017.
©2020 Charles River Editors (P)2020 Charles River Editors
Bushido Code: The Way of the Warrior in Modern Times
Summary
The Bushido code is a code of honor that greatly influenced Japan’s culture in the 700’s. Bushido started as a code of war and went onto become a way of life and art. It governed every part of life, from honor and war to literature and poetry. Moreover, it impacted history in a significant way, from medieval times to World War II period. The Bushido is said to have begun in the 8th century. It was influenced by Shintoism, Confucianism, and Zen Buddhism. Some of the noblemen that adhered to Bushido later became samurai and eventually guards for daimyos and shoguns. The samurai have been known to serve their masters loyally; in fact, the term samurai translates to “one who serves”. The samurai carried swords during the Edo Period and these swords were perceived as a sign of trouble. During the Tokugawa period, the samurai were forbidden from having swords - that is when peace started returning to Japan. The samurai then turned to literature and arts. There are countless books written about the teachings and virtues of the Bushido. A samurai had only two options: life and death. In life, emphasis was placed on ability to fight, strength, and military prowess. A samurai warrior was always ready for battle.
©2019 Adidas Wilson (P)2019 Adidas Wilson
William McKinley
Summary
"That's all a man can hope for during his lifetime - to set an example - and when he is dead, to be an inspiration for history." (William McKinley) Although he is often overlooked in American history today, few presidents marked a turning point for the country quite like William McKinley. As the last president to have served in the Civil War, he represented the end of an era, while at the same time his pro-business policies set in motion the Progressive Era, a period almost universally associated with Theodore Roosevelt. Of course, the reason that period is aligned with Roosevelt is because McKinley had the unfortunate distinction of being one of the only four presidents to be assassinated. In September 1901, the city of Buffalo was full of celebration. The Pan-American Exposition was ongoing, and it brought notable figures to northern New York, including President McKinley, who had been reelected less than a year earlier. But also in Buffalo was Leon Czolgosz, a young man who had turned to anarchy, years earlier, after losing his job. Embracing his philosophy wholeheartedly, Czolgosz believed it was his mission to take down a powerful leader he considered oppressive, and McKinley’s attendance gave him the chance. President James Garfield had been assassinated just 20 years earlier, but McKinley didn’t worry about presidential security or his own safety, and that was the case in Buffalo. McKinley’s insistence on greeting the public and shaking hands allowed Czolgosz to walk up to him on September 6, 1901, at a public reception in the Temple of Music on the expo grounds and shoot him point blank, with one bullet grazing the president and another lodging in his abdomen. In the aftermath of the shooting, as Czolgosz was beaten and seized by the crowd, he uttered, "I done my duty." For his part, McKinley said, “He didn't know, poor fellow, what he was doing. He couldn't have known." Despite being president, McKinley’s medical services were shoddy, and given the still primitive medical standards of the early 20th century, gunshots to the abdomen often brought death. One of the best known aspects of the assassination is that Thomas Edison’s x-ray machine was on hand and may have been used to try to locate the bullet that doctors couldn’t find, but for reasons that remain unknown, the x-ray machine was not used. Nevertheless, McKinley seemed to improve over the next few days, and people became optimistic that he would be all right. As H. Wayne Morgan, one of McKinley’s biographers, noted, “His hearty constitution, everyone said, would see him through. The doctors seemed hopeful, even confident. It is difficult to understand the cheer with which they viewed their patient. He was nearly 60 years old, overweight, and the wound itself had not been thoroughly cleaned or traced. Precautions against infections, admittedly difficult in 1901, were negligently handled.” Ultimately, McKinley’s wounds became gangrenous a week after he was shot, and after he took a turn for the worse, he died on the morning of September 14, nearly eight days after he was shot. William McKinley: The Life and Legacy of the Third President to Be Assassinated chronicles the life and death of the president.
©2020 Charles River Editors (P)2020 Charles River Editors
Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung
Summary
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) is known around the world as the “Father of Psychoanalysis,” and for good reason. If anything, Freud’s first patient was himself. A sufferer of psychosomatic symptoms, Freud diagnosed himself as having a repressed antagonism against his father. From there, Freud began to build on his now famous concepts of the unconscious, infantile sexuality and repression. And of course, there’s his famous theory on the structure of the mind, which has made Id and Ego a commonly used part of the English lexicon. In addition to all but creating a new field of science, Freud also contributed to entire industries. One of the first to try to analyze dreams, Freud’s work has led patients in search of psychological explanations for various physical and mental symptoms and phenomena. The Interpretation of Dreams is Sigmund Freud's best known work, focusing on his theory of the unconscious with respect to dream interpretation. To Freud, dreams represented the unconscious attempt to fulfill some sort of wish, either by resolving a conflict or bringing certain memories to the surface. Carl Gustav Jung, the man who created analytical psychology both as a concept and as a practice, was a complicated person. He is also very difficult to understand, partly because so many of his personality traits seem to be contradictory and sometimes mutually exclusive. Ferociously intelligent, he used rigorous scientific method to derive a completely new set of tools for understanding and healing the human mind, yet he also believed completely in telepathy, ESP, poltergeists, and precognitive dreams, and he was convinced that coincidences were not the result of chance but evidence of the ability of the human mind to manipulate the physical world.
©2020 Charles River Editors (P)2020 Charles River Editors
British Covert Operations in World War I
Summary
World War I, also known in its time as the “Great War” or the “War to End all Wars”, was an unprecedented holocaust in terms of its sheer scale. Fought by men who hailed from all corners of the globe, it saw millions of soldiers do battle in brutal assaults of attrition which dragged on for months with little to no respite. Tens of millions of artillery shells and untold hundreds of millions of rifle and machine gun bullets were fired in a conflict that demonstrated man’s capacity to kill each other on a heretofore unprecedented scale, and as always, such a war brought about technological innovation at a rate that made the boom of the Industrial Revolution seem stagnant. The most iconic images of the First World War are of the war on land. They depict the trench lines, the shell holes, and the barbed wire. They show a generation of young men in uniform, living in holes dug from the dirt, rifle in hand, waiting for the next devastating artillery bombardment, but part of that same generation faced a very different war - one that was just as important in deciding the fate of Europe, but which is often forgotten in popular histories. This was the war at sea. It was vital to the economic side of the war, as the Allies cut off Germany's supply lines from the outside world and so placed a squeeze on their opponents' military industries. Here, events took place that would draw America into the war, providing the Allies with a new pool of manpower and so ensuring that the scales of the conflict tipped in their favor. Many members of British society viewed war as a sport, a lethal one admittedly, but one played by gentlemen in the spirit of amateurism and fair play as it had been throughout the British Empire in the preceding decades. The bloody stalemate on the Western Front caught them unprepared for the dark arts of covert warfare which would be needed to avert defeat, gain the initiative, win the war and, ultimately, shape the peace. Those operations would witness the evolution of an ad hoc coalition of stakeholders from the military, the political elite, academics, technical experts, various kinds of industry, the media, and even the artistic community, all of which came together to wage a variety of forms of covert warfare. Many of the programs were technically successful, and in some cases, they undoubtedly saved lives and shortened the war. In the process, the administration and execution of covert warfare became increasingly well-organized and sophisticated. Given the nature of war, many operations and many technologies have to be covert in order to be successful, and that imposes limits on democratic oversight, but in the case of the First World War, the boundaries of what was acceptable under the bounds of morality and the laws of war were repeatedly challenged and extended by all the participants. Concurrent with that, the powers of the British state were massively and permanently enhanced, but Parliament was rarely consulted and no mechanisms for internal consistency or democratic oversight were developed. In some cases that absence of democratic oversight was legitimate according to the needs and laws of war, but in other cases, it was not, and the democratic deficit which resulted has had lasting consequences. British Covert Operations in World War I: The History of Britain’s Espionage and Dark Arts During the Great War examines some of the most daring operations conducted behind the lines.
©2020 Charles River Editors (P)2020 Charles River Editors