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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jack7" data-source="post: 5182032" data-attributes="member: 54707">Faction:Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - This is a very interesting book about corporate espionage. In the past I worked a couple of cases involving espionage, one of them being an act of espionage targeted against one of my former clients who was attempting to establish an international licensing agreement. Actually that was counter-espionage, as far as I was concerned. As well as being my first real exposure to corporate espionage. I like this book and am finding it interesting.Master of Shadows - This book is about the secret diplomatic and spy career of the painter Peter Paul Rubens. I very much enjoy reading biographies of this type. I have read more than one book about Isaac Newton's career in the exchequer hunting down criminals for the crown. (I also read a very interesting fictional book about the same subject matter which I can't recall the title of right now.) Not long ago I finished reading a book about W. Somerset Maugham's (one of my favorite modern novelists) career as an agent for the British government. I've read several books of this type and find most of them highly interesting. Some even fascinating.Praying with Icons - A book I picked up from the library the other day about using icons as prayer and meditative tools for spiritual exercises and experiences. It has some interesting ideas and approaches. It even has Rules for the Icon Painter, which I like, as one day I intend to paint the icons I have designed and sketched. I have designed a set of icon sketches in which I have placed my children, family, and friends in some of the background scenes. I'd like to paint those eventually.Fiction:The King's Trade - This is an Alan Lewrie historical naval novel. I'm getting to where I like Dewey Lambdin almost as much as I like Patrick O'Brian. Lambdin is not quite as good a writer, and the language is not as grand, but his tales of being at sea are superb (like Hornblower) and the man obviously knows his stuff. His books are very good.Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall - This is a graphic novel with an unusual (and nice twist on 1001 Arabian Nights). Some of the stories are excellent, some are just okay, but overall I recommend it.Lecture:The Tiber and the Potomac: Empires of Trust - This excellent lecture series, which I just started, is by one of my favorite professors, Thom Madden. It talks about America as a very peculiar kind of "Empire," an Empire of Trust, and compares it in some ways to the Early Republic of Rome and how Rome "backed into an Empire" without wanting to. I'd like to see Madden do a lecture series on how much the Byzantine empire was like America, or actually how much of America is descended from the Byzantine Empire (my personal theory). Though Madden did do an excellent lecture series on the Byzantines called Empire of Gold. I recommend both Empire of Gold and Empires of Trust.</blockquote>

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