The Latest

SCIENCE FICTION

MYSTERIES & THRILLERS

A brilliant addition to a long-running thriller series

A brilliant addition to a long-running thriller series

Leonard Summers; his wife, Martha; and son, Bernard, are moving into a remote cabin in Minnesota. But his name isn't Leonard Summers. It's Leonid Sokolov. And "he was in some kind of enforcement branch of the Russian spy agency," Lucas Davenport explains to fellow US Marshal...

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NONFICTION

How Adolf Hitler raised the money to finance his rise

How Adolf Hitler raised the money to finance his rise

From its early days following World War I, what Hitler later renamed the Nazi Party had a powerful political sponsor behind the scenes: the Thule Society. Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw notes that the organization's "membership list ... reads like a Who's Who of early Nazi...

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Popular Fiction

A brilliant novel of love, hope, and the Rwanda genocide

A brilliant novel of love, hope, and the Rwanda genocide

Today, Rwanda is one of the brightest lights in Africa. The economy is booming. Corruption is rare. Government delivers services. The streets of Kigali, the capital, are clean. It's even easy to open a business. Thirty years ago the country was in chaos, as this award-winning...

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Explore My “BEST OF the category” selections

WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE BOOK?

When people ask me that question, I never know what to say. In a lifetime of reading, I’ve read many thousands of books. And I’ve reviewed well over 2,000 of them on this site. Picking just one as a “favorite,” or even a handful of them, makes no sense to me.

The problem is, I read for many different reasons. Perhaps you do, too. And I read many different sorts of books. Mysteries and thrillers. Popular fiction, especially historical fiction. Science fiction.

And nonfiction, history in particular. You’ll find hundreds of reviews in every one of those categories on this site.

Look to the right for a rotating random selection culled from throughout this site.

Happy reading!

 

It Was All a Lie explains how the Republican Party became Donald Trump.

How the Republican Party became Donald Trump

Amazon lists more than 1,000 books about Donald Trump. And only two US Presidents—George Washington and Abraham Lincoln—account for more (over 2,000 in each case). But Trump hasn't even completed a single term in office, and there are lots more books to come. One of the latest, and in its way most...
Cover image of "The Library Book," which is about an arson fire, the expanded role of libraries, and eccentric librarians.

An arson fire, the growing role of libraries, and eccentric librarians

How good is The Library Book? It's unquestionably one of the most enjoyable books I've read in recent years. Susan Orlean has a magical way with prose, and she turns what could easily be a monumentally boring subject into a captivating tale. Even if you're not a passionate devotee of public...
Cover image of "Asian American Histories of the United States," an Asian American history book

An Asian American history book focused on the present

Since the middle of the nineteenth century, people we now call Asian Americans have made major contributions to American society. You have only to look around you in a hospital, where Philippine American nurses work in huge numbers. Or to glance at the headlines about the CEOs of high-tech...
Cover image of "Spies in the Family," a memoir that includes the story of the top CIA asset in the Cold War

Handling America’s greatest asset in the Soviet Union

He served our country for eighteen years, the longest-running, highest-ranking CIA asset in the history of the Cold War. He was active as a spy for the United States during the most intense years of the Cold War, from 1961 to 1980. And by then his "briefing transcripts and photocopies of secret...
Cover image of "The Woman and Her Stars,"

She was a pioneering astronomer. In the 18th century.

Women did not begin to gain any measure of equality with men until sometime in the 20th century. So it is always inspiring to read about women whose accomplishments were so outstanding that even under the most egregious pressure of misogyny they made their mark on history. One exceptional woman,...
Cover image of "The Marco Effect," a thriller involving child soldiers

Child soldiers, bank fraud, and eccentric police in a Danish thriller

In a region of Cameroon populated by people outsiders call pygmies, a Danish development project has gone off the rails. Then, shortly after a visitor from the Danish foreign ministry is glimpsed on a visit, the local liaison between the project and the Danes is brutally murdered. Back home in...
Cover image of "Requiem for the American Dream," a book about the concentration of wealth

Noam Chomsky on the concentration of wealth and its consequences

For decades, economic scholars have commented on the dangers inherent in the growing concentration of wealth in Western society. Though misleadingly referred to as "income inequality" in the new media, this critically important topic actively entered public debate in 2011 with Occupy Wall Street....
Cover image of "In the Garden of Beasts," a book about American anti-semitism during the rise of Hitler's Germany

Why the U.S. failed to speak out against Hitler’s rise

In the years 1933-41, a passion for isolationism gripped the American psyche, keeping President Roosevelt from speaking out against the growth of Nazism and the ever-tightening vise of oppression and violence directed at Germany's tiny Jewish minority (less than one percent of the population)....
The Sound of Broken Glass is by mystery writer Deborah Crombie.

A mystery writer can have a bad day, can’t she?

A review of The Sound of Broken Glass, by Deborah Crombie. @@@ (3 out of 5). Scotland Yard detectives Duncan Kincaid, Gemma James, and Melody Talbot unravel the brutal murder of a prominent London lawyer.

Cover image of "The Terraformers," a novel that portrays a hopeful future

A hopeful future in this brilliant new novel

When Berkeley-based science fiction author Annalee Newitz set out to write a novel about a hopeful future, The Terraformers was the result. And I am here to report that they succeeded brilliantly. It's set at a far-distant time when the human race has spread among thousands of worlds throughout...

My Most Popular Reviews

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Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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Mal Warwick

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My latest
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…includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.

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