The Latest

SCIENCE FICTION

Four robots wake up in a restaurant, and they’re in charge

Four robots wake up in a restaurant, and they’re in charge

California's long War of Independence has ended. It's 2064. All of a sudden the new country's many sentient robots, most of them veterans, face an uncertain future. The president has signed legislation declaring them HEEI (pronounced HE-eye), or Human Equivalent Embodied...

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MYSTERIES & THRILLERS

Murder on the Trans-Siberian Express

Murder on the Trans-Siberian Express

Work began on the Trans-Siberian Railway on March 9, 1891. Then, Tsar Alexander III still ruled the Russian Empire. But when he died at the age of 49 three years later, his feckless son Nicholas II ascended to the Imperial Throne. And at immense expense, Nicholas realized his...

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NONFICTION

How the women’s revolution changed the CIA

How the women’s revolution changed the CIA

Few agencies of the US Government resisted women's liberation and the civil rights movement as long or as fiercely as the CIA. Born in the macho exploits of the OSS in World War II, an old boys' network continued to direct the country's premier spy service well into the 1980s....

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Popular Fiction

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!

 

Cover image of "Half a Crown," a novel by Jo Walton

Jo Walton finds the present in an alternate history of the past

Alternate history can illuminate the present. Recently I reviewed the first two books in Jo Walton's alternate history of England after World War II, the Farthing Trilogy, Farthing and Ha'penny. I found them to be both intriguing from an historical perspective and adeptly written as novels of...
How to Be an Antiracist explains how racism still kills.

Racism still kills

Fear and violence directed against "the other" are as old as humanity itself. Antisemitism with its two thousand-year-old history may be the most ancient large-scale manifestation of "otherism" in a form widely recognized today. And racism, as we know it in the West, appears to have originated in...
Cover image of "The Attention Merchants," a novel about pop-up ads and other advertising techniques

The penny press, Amos ‘n Andy, and pop-up ads

If you've been paying attention, you can't have missed the changes in the character of advertising over the course of your life. Certainly, I have. Chances are, you were born in the age of radio, at the earliest. If so, you've witnessed a string of new technologies enter the realm of news and...
In "A First-Class Catastrophe," Diana B. Henriques explains whats wrong on Wall Street.

A lucid and thoroughly researched account of what’s wrong on Wall Street

Fifty-five years ago I became a speculator in New York City. Which means that what did helps explain what's wrong on Wall Street. I was suffering through graduate school at Columbia University at the time and found it much more enjoyable to watch the ticker tape in a broker’s office rather than...
Cover image of "Hillbilly Elegy," a book about hillbilly culture

Hillbilly? Redneck? White trash?

Two recent books set out to paint a picture of working-class culture. One is White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, by Nancy Isenberg. I found the book to be too densely written and couldn't finish reading it. The other is far more accessible. Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a...
Timescape

An ingenious twist on time travel

Physics can drive you crazy. Solid matter isn't solid. Black holes don't just make matter and light disappear; they suck up information, too. And Schrödinger's cat is both alive and dead at the same time. Go figure. And if paradoxes like these rattle your nerves, you may want to avoid reading...
Cover image of "Live by Night," an action-packed novel

A thoughtful, action-packed crime story

Some years later, on a tugboat in the Gulf of Mexico, Joe Coughlin's feet were placed in a tub of cement. Twelve gunmen stood waiting until they got far enough out to sea to throw him overboard." Thus opens Dennis Lehane's action-packed novel, Live by Night. It is 1926, years before this...
"Binti" is the Binti Trilogy book one.

An African student travels to the stars in the first book of the Binti Trilogy

You'll love Binti. In the first book of the trilogy that bears her name, she sets out at the age of sixteen for Oomza Uni on a distant planet. "None of my family had wanted me to go," she notes. Oomza Uni "was the top of the top, its population was only 5 percent human . . . [and Binti] was the...
Da Vinci Code sequel Inferno by Dan Brown

So, he wrote The Da Vinci Code. What else can he do?

A review of Inferno, by Dan Brown. @@@ (3 out of 5). Dan Brown’s fourth novel about Harvard art historian Robert Langdon and his perilous misadventures in Europe.

The Counterfeit Agent in Alex Berenson's novel is a rogue ex-CIA agent.

Alex Berenson’s John Wells takes on a rogue ex-CIA agent

The modern history of Iran and the US is fraught with conflict. Today, Americans vilify the ayatollahs who have governed Iran since its revolution in 1979. We're all too likely to forget (assuming we ever knew in the first place) that the Iranian Revolution was in large part a consequence of the...

My Most Popular Reviews

Weekly Reviews Delivered to You!

Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

Weekly book reviews to match your taste!

Love mysteries and thrillers? Historical fiction fan? Prefer to read nonfiction? Or, like me, you just love reading? Take your pick of my three weekly newsletters. Just click the Yes! button, and you’re on your way.

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Mal Warwick

The latest mystery & thriller book reviews every Tuesday.

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…includes my latest nonfiction book review, with links to other nonfiction content.

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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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