Audiobooks narrated by Rick Adamson

Warrior to Civilian: The Field Manual for the Hero's Journey

A compassionate, practical guidebook for veterans transitioning from active duty to civilian life and for the loved ones supporting their journey. "Challenging yet reassuring....a key addition to every veteran's packing list ." --Stan McChrystal, General, US Army (Ret) and Co-Founder and CEO, McChrystal Group Some important statistics: - There are over 22 million veterans alive today - Each year, more than 200,000 new veterans transition out of active duty. - Approximately 22 veterans commit suicide a day, and even more are living with PTSD, traumatic brain injury (TBI), struggling with substance abuse, homelessness, and experience many, many other difficulties. It's clear that we have not honored the promise we make to veterans: that we as a country will help them after they've served and sacrificed. And while there are many books written by and for veterans, only a small selection of those address the transition to civilian life, and none are a truly complete reference for stepping out of service and back into normal life. Warrior to Civilian covers a range of topics, from the practical-finding a job, reintegrating into family life-to the more challenging topics, like dealing with loss, and finding new purpose in life. This well-curated resource incorporates stories, insights, and observations from veterans and their partners; evidence-based advice from health professionals and experts who work closely with veterans; and inspiration taken from heavyweights like Jon Kabbat-Zinn and Tony Robbins. The authors take care to address the unique challenges faced by veterans of color, and those in the LGBTQ+ communities. With support from some of our country's most recognizable military members, authors Rob Sarver, a former SEAL, and Alex Gendzier, combine their voices and their experiences in and out of the military in a unique way that will make this resource shine. Scaffolded by the hero's journey, in which the hero experiences a series of transformative events, they reveal that within the loss that many veterans have suffered while serving and suffer in the transition, there is great opportunity for healing.

Alex Gendzier, Robert Sarver (Author), Rick Adamson, TBD (Narrator)

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Carlo Acutis: The First Millennial Saint

Carlo Acutis, born in 1991, fully embraced the gift of life. Known as a computer whiz, he liked to play soccer, video games, and the saxophone. He enjoyed watching his favorite dramas and making short films with his cast of cats and dogs. He had many friends and enjoyed spending time with them. Yet Carlo was a little 'different' at school, in the pizzerias, and on the soccer field. What set Carlo apart was his constant pursuit of holiness. He spent time teaching catechism classes and serving in soup kitchens. Carlo loved to attend daily Mass and frequent Eucharistic adoration. The Word of God and the Eucharist were the center of his life. Carlo's unwavering devotion to the Eucharist inspired him to tell the story of Eucharistic miracles through a website he created. He wanted to deepen his own knowledge of these phenomena, to strengthen his devotion to Jesus, and to invite others to grow in love for the Eucharist. The website caught the attention of people across the globe, introducing countless people to Eucharistic miracles. Carlo died from a sudden illness in 2006. In less than a decade, his story spread across Italy and around the world. After Pope Francis declared him venerable in 2018, his beatification was celebrated in Assisi on October 10, 2020. The next step will be canonization, making him the first millennial saint.

Nicola Gori (Author), Rick Adamson (Narrator)

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Explorers: A New History

Unfurling a tapestry of surprising and historically overlooked figures spanning forty centuries and six continents, historian Matthew Lockwood narrates lives filled with imagination and wonder, curiosity, connection, and exchange. Familiar icons of exploration like Pocahontas, Columbus, Sacagawea, and Captain Cook find new company in the untold stories of people usually denied the title 'explorers,' including immigrants, indigenous interpreters, local guides, and fugitive slaves. He highlights female voyagers like Gudrid Far-Traveler and Freydís Eiríksdóttir, Viking women who sailed to North America in 1000 AD, and Mary Wortley Montagu, whose pioneering travels to Constantinople would lead to the development of the world's first smallpox vaccine. Figures like Ghulam Rassul Galwan, a guide for European travelers in the Himalayas, reveal the hidden labor, expertise, and local enthusiasm behind many grand stories of discovery. Other characters, like David Dorr, a man born into slavery in New Orleans who embarked on a Grand Tour of Europe and Egypt, embody discovery and wonder as universal parts of the human condition. Adventurers from every corner of the globe search for the unknown and try to understand it, remaking the world and themselves in the process. Exploration is for everyone who sets off into the unknown. It is the inheritance of all.

Matthew Lockwood (Author), Rick Adamson (Narrator)

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How to Talk with Anyone about Anything: The Practice of Safe Conversations

Relationships everywhere are in crisis due to our inability to talk about 'difference' without polarizing. Since objection to difference is the core human problem, we need a skill that helps us connect beyond difference. That's just what New York Times bestselling authors Dr. Harville Hendrix and Dr. Helen LaKelly Hunt offer in their new book: How To Talk With Anyone About Anything. They call it the Safe Conversations Dialogue process, which everyone can learn and teach, that moves all relationships from danger to safety, making connecting possible. For centuries, most of us humans have talked to others in monologues, believing that the world is the way we see it, that what we say about it is the 'truth' and we have assumed that everyone sees it 'our' way. If they do not, we experience tension and conflict on many levels. On the other hand, few of us have ever listened to others while they are talking and tried to see the world from their point of view while retaining our own perspective. Instead of listening to understand and collaborate about our differences, we tend to replace their perspective with our own. This results in polarization, not only in our personal lives and work environments, but also in the political and religious arenas we inhabit. This has led to anxiety, frustration, anger, violence, and war. Clearly, the world needs a new way to talk that transcends difference and leads to collaboration, co-creation, and cooperation. Getting the Love You Want, teach that the practice of Safe Conversations Dialogue impacts the 'physics of the Space Between.' Here is what they mean: - All of us live in and are a part of an energy field in which everything everywhere is connecting with everything everywhere. This energy field occupies the Space-Between us. - When there is safety in the energy field that occupies the Space-Between us, we can connect. - When there is anxiety in the Space Between, we defend ourselves. We cannot connect but tend to polarize. - Anyone, if they decide to, can restore safety in the Space Between by using a structure conversation skill called the Safe Conversations Dialogue. In How to Talk with Anyone about Anything, Harville and Helen share the wisdom of the Safe Conversations process and the four structured and teachable skills that create safety and connection: - Dialogue: Dialogue is two or more people taking turns talking and listening. Monologue is one person talking and expecting everyone else to listen. When two or more people shift from Monologue to Dialogue, they can transform any relationship from conflict to safety, connection and collaboration. - Zero Negativity: Negativity disrupts safety and is non-negotiable for safe and thriving relationships. When Dialogue is practiced with Zero Negativity, criticism about what one does not have is replaced with a positive request for what one wants. This transforms conflict into safety and connecting. - Empathy: Empathy is the capacity to experience or imagine how another person has gone through life. When Dialogue is practiced with empathy, one can more easily accept the different perspective of another person and maintain one's own perspective without polarizing. - Affirmation: Affirmation is valuing another person because they exist rather than for what they have done for you. When Dialogue includes affirmation, the other person experiences themselves as human rather than as an 'object' that is valued because of what they do. How to Talk with Anyone about Anything offers the keys to unlocking your ability to connect with others in a new and profoundly different way. And, as more of us hone that ability, together, we can bring about a fundamental shift in society away from our current focus on the 'self' and polarization about difference towards safety and true connection that includes total personal freedom, universal equality, radical inclusion, and celebration of diversity-a society in which we all collaborate with each other without surrendering our differences, co-create with each other about new solutions and cooperate with other to put them into practice. Then we will all live in the world of our dreams.

Harville Hendrix, Harville Hendrix, Phd, Helen LaKelly Hunt (Author), Rick Adamson, TBD (Narrator)

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The Code of Honor: Embracing Ethics in Cybersecurity

While some professions—including medicine, law, and engineering—have wholeheartedly embraced wide-ranging codes of ethics and conduct, the field of cybersecurity continues to lack an overarching ethical standard. This vacuum constitutes a significant threat to the safety of consumers and businesses around the world, slows commerce, and delays innovation. The Code of Honor: Embracing Ethics in Cybersecurity delivers a first of its kind comprehensive discussion of the ethical challenges that face contemporary information security workers, managers, and executives. Authors Ed Skoudis, president of the SANS Technology Institute College and founder of the Counter Hack team, and Dr. Paul Maurer, president of Montreat College, explain how timeless ethical wisdom gives birth to the Cybersecurity Code which is currently being adopted by security practitioners and leaders around the world. This practical book tells numerous engaging stories that highlight ethically complex situations many cybersecurity and tech professionals commonly encounter. It also contains compelling real-world case studies—called Critical Applications—at the end of each chapter that help the listener determine how to apply the hands-on skills described in the book.

Ed Skoudis, Paul J. Maurer (Author), Rick Adamson (Narrator)

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Fighting From Above: A Combat History of the US Air Force

The story of the United States Air Force (USAF) stretches back to aerial operations prior to the First World War and looks forward to a new era of airpower in space. Fighting from Above presents a concise account of this history, offering a new perspective on how the air forces of the United States created an independent way of warfare over time. From the earliest battles of the USAF's predecessor organizations to its modern incarnation, Brian D. Laslie identifies four distinct ways of war that developed over four distinct epochs. Beginning with the development of early air power (1906–1941), he highlights the creation of roles and missions. An era of strategic dominance (1942–1975) followed in which the ideas of strategic bombardment ruled the air force; when such notions were unceremoniously proven false during the Vietnam-era conflicts, a period of tactical ascendancy (1975–2019) began. Finally, Laslie considers the current environment, where much of the story of the USAF remains unwritten as it grapples with the prospects and challenges posed by drones and the U.S. Space Force. While detailing combat operations, Fighting from Above also pays close attention to technology, politics, rivalries, logistics, policy, organization, equipping, and training. It is an authoritative history of the development of American airpower.

Brian D. Laslie (Author), Rick Adamson (Narrator)

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Roadblocked: Joe Biden's Rocky Transition to the Presidency

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris began their transition to the White House in the most unusual of circumstances: a global pandemic, a sitting president violently refusing to accept the results of the election, and a historic racial reckoning all posed profound questions about how they would staff large parts of the government and articulate policy remedies to pressing problems in just eleven weeks. Heath Brown's Roadblocked is a revelatory look at the seventy days between the election and the inauguration with a focus on the ways the Biden-Harris transition team sought help and advice to overcome these obstacles. More than that, Roadblocked is also a gripping history of US presidential transitions over the past half-century that compares the transition teams of the last four administrations. Biden-Harris transition leaders had a massive team with a stated aim to promote coordination, encourage teamwork, and avoid siloing staff. In the end, however, these aims were foiled by the conditions of the pandemic and steep hierarchies, which both reduced collaboration and information sharing. In the end, despite substantial changes in the Democratic coalition, newly influential groups armed with novel tactics, and great shifts in their political agenda, the Biden-Harris transition did not lead to transformation. Roadblocked explains why.

Heath Brown (Author), Rick Adamson (Narrator)

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Finding Your Third Place: Building Happier Communities (and Making Great Friends Along the Way)

Do you have a Third Place? Your first place is home, your second place is work, and your third place is where you go to socialize. As more of our lives are spent online and in digital spaces, these often overlooked 'Third Places' play a crucial role in keeping our communities vibrant. In a timely and thoughtful examination, Richard Kyte, PhD, explores the places that nurture our souls and make up the bedrock of our communities. Third Places can range from a neighborhood tavern, to a community center, to a local bookstore or coffee shop. They are the critical gathering spaces where friendships are formed, relationships are nurtured, and the tapestry of community is woven. Yet, for an ever-growing list of reasons, many people today find themselves without a third place of their own. At a time when our nation is facing an epidemic of loneliness, when communities are suffering from loss of trust, low levels of engagement, despair, and political polarization, what if the answer to many of our problems lies in a simple idea? What if we just need to pay attention to the places where we find ourselves?

Richard Kyte Phd (Author), Rick Adamson (Narrator)

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Glorious Lessons: John Trumbull, Painter of the American Revolution

The complicated life and legacy of John Trumbull, whose paintings portrayed both the struggle and the principles that distinguished America's founding moment John Trumbull (1756-1843) experienced the American Revolution firsthand-he served as aid to George Washington and Horatio Gates, was shot at, and was jailed as a spy. He made it his mission to record the war, giving visual form to what most citizens of the new United States thought: that they had brought into the world a great and unprecedented political experiment. His purpose, he wrote, was 'to preserve and diffuse the memory of the noblest series of actions which have ever presented themselves in the history of man.' Although Trumbull's contemporaries viewed him as a painter, Trumbull thought of himself as a historian. Richard Brookhiser tells Trumbull's story of acclaim and recognition, a story complicated by provincialism, war, a messy personal life, and, ultimately, changing fashion. He shows how the artist's fifty-year project embodied the meaning of American exceptionalism and played a key role in defining the values of the new country. Trumbull depicted the story of self-rule in the modern world-a story as important and as contested today as it was 250 years ago.

Richard Brookhiser (Author), Rick Adamson, TBD (Narrator)

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Behind the Startup: How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, and Inequality

In recent years, dreams about our technological future have soured as digital platforms have undermined privacy, eroded labor rights, and weakened democratic discourse. In light of the negative consequences of innovation, some blame harmful algorithms or greedy CEOs. Behind the Startup focuses instead on the role of capital and the influence of financiers. Drawing on nineteen months of participant-observation research inside a successful Silicon Valley startup, this book examines how the company was organized to meet the needs of the venture capital investors who funded it. Investors push startups to scale as quickly as possible to inflate the value of their asset. Benjamin Shestakofsky shows how these demands create organizational problems that managers solve by combining high-tech systems with low-wage human labor. With its focus on the financialization of innovation, Behind the Startup explains how the gains generated by these companies are funneled into the pockets of a small cadre of elite investors and entrepreneurs. To promote innovation that benefits the many rather than the few, Shestakofsky compellingly argues that we must focus less on fixing the technology and more on changing the financial infrastructure that supports it.

Benjamin Shestakofsky (Author), Rick Adamson (Narrator)

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A World of Enemies: America's Wars at Home and Abroad from Kennedy to Biden

Over the past half-century, Americans have watched their country extend its military power to what seemed the very ends of the earth. America's might is felt on nearly every continent-and even on its own streets. Decades ago, the Wars on Drugs and Terror broke down the walls separating law enforcement from military operations. A World of Enemies tells the story of how an America plagued by fears of waning power and influence embraced foreign and domestic forever wars. Osamah Khalil argues that the militarization of US domestic and foreign affairs was the product of America's failure in Vietnam. Unsettled by their inability to prevail in Southeast Asia, US leaders increasingly came to see a host of problems as immune to political solutions. Rather, crime, drugs, and terrorism were enemies spawned in 'badlands'-whether the Middle East or stateside inner cities. Characterized as sites of endemic violence, badlands lay beyond the pale of civilization, their ostensibly racially and culturally alien inhabitants best handled by force. Its failures-in Iraq, Afghanistan, US cities, and increasingly rural and borderland America-have only served to reinforce fears of weakness. It is time, Khalil argues, for a new approach. Instead of managing never-ending conflicts, we need to reinvest in the tools of traditional politics and diplomacy.

Osamah F. Khalil (Author), Rick Adamson (Narrator)

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The Individualization of War: Rights, Liability, and Accountability in Contemporary Armed Conflict

The rights and responsibilities of the individual are at the center of today's armed conflicts in a way that they have never been before. This process of 'individualization,' which challenges the primacy of the sovereign state, is driven by normative developments related to human rights that have elevated human-centric conceptions of security and created a new class of international crimes, as well as by technological and strategic developments that can both empower individuals as military actors and enable either the targeting or protection of particular individuals. The Individualization of War examines the status of individuals in contemporary armed conflict in three main capacities: as subject to violence but deserving of protection; as liable to harm because of their responsibility for attacks on others; and as agents who can be held accountable for the perpetration of crimes. This book presents a novel conceptualization of the phenomenon of individualization, including how it is both practiced and contested. It then convenes a set of leading thinkers from the fields of moral philosophy, international law, and international relations to further our understanding of not only how individualization is manifest in armed conflict-in theory and in practice-but also how it generates tensions and challenges for today's scholars and practitioners.

Dapo Akande, David Rodin, Jennifer Welsh (Author), Rick Adamson (Narrator)

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Audiobooks Narrated by Rick Adamson