Jim Mangi

After somewhat accidentally volunteering for, and serving in, Vietnam with the 25th Infantry Division, Jim got a PhD in ecology and spent 40 years in the “What If?” business. The consulting firm he set up predicted the effects of things like power plants, dams, pipelines, and military equipment, some of which he can talk about.

When he sold his company to care for his wife, who has Alzheimer’s disease, Jim turned his predictive skills around. Instead of systematically predicting the future, he now “predicts the past”, from the perspective that if specific, identifiable actions or decisions in the past had occurred differently, they would have led to very different chains of subsequent events.

Jim lives in Michigan where he cares for his wife and volunteers with the Alzheimer’s Association teaching classes on dementia and caregiving, and educating communities on how to make life easier for friends and neighbors living with dementia. The dedication of his books state that his proceeds go to that Association, (and its UK analog) “to help make it possible that no one is forced by a brain disease to live in an alternate reality”.