by envisionmg | Aug 26, 2016 | Jim Reviews
I love reading all things espionage (as you may have noticed if you have read my other reviews). Fiction or non-fiction, it does not matter. My fascination with it rests in the fact that it is kind of the dark side of what I do for a living: searching for information....
by envisionmg | Aug 15, 2016 | History, Jim Reviews
I grew up in the post-Vietnam War generation. I always had a feeling, as a child, that I wasn’t supposed to ask questions about the war. Prior to college my only knowledge of the war was a) we lost and b) it was bad. When I took classes on the war in college, I...
by envisionmg | Aug 9, 2016 | History, Jim Reviews
I picked up this book largely because it was, as the subtitle suggests, something I had never heard of before. Seligman’s Tong Wars is a story of Chinese American organized crime in New York City from its birth in the later half of the 19th century into the...
by envisionmg | Jul 22, 2016 | History, Jim Reviews
You know how one book leads to another? The Richest Man Who Ever Lived by Greg Steinmetz is one of those. I was reading The Medici: Power, Money, and Ambition in the Italian Renaissance and the name Jacob Fugger was mentioned. It was almost nothing; just a mention...
by envisionmg | Jun 28, 2016 | History, Jim Reviews
I have a thing for the Medici. At least I have a thing for the first few Medici. Once you get to Lorenzo the Magnificent the family takes a sharp turn down hill. However Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici, Cosimo de Medici (I have a picture of him next to my desk and...
by envisionmg | Jun 15, 2016 | History, Jim Reviews
If you ask most people what caused the American Revolution you would get some basic answer like “no taxation without representation,” stamps, or tea. We all have little niggling memories from school of being told, but can’t quite give a coherent...
