The Latest

SCIENCE FICTION

Dystopia unfolds through the eyes of a precocious 10-year-old

Dystopia unfolds through the eyes of a precocious 10-year-old

Since the publication of The Russian Debutante's Handbook in 2002 and Absurdistan four years later, Gary Shteyngart has deployed satire and humor to illuminate the human condition in our times. He followed those two novels with his first venture into dystopia, Super Sad True...

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MYSTERIES & THRILLERS

NONFICTION

Seven men and one woman set the course of the United States

Seven men and one woman set the course of the United States

A handful of rich white men played leading roles in the American independence movement and the early years of the republic they created. You know their names: George Washington, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison. Others—John...

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Popular Fiction

A royal scam in 15th century England

A royal scam in 15th century England

One day in 1480 a nameless nobleman and a priest show up at Will Collan's farm. They've come for his 12-year-old son, John. As they explain to the boy, he's not John Collan but a legitimate claimant to the English throne. As a small child, his partisans had hidden him away in...

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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!

 

Khaled Hosseini in Berkeley, in person and in print

A review of And the Mountains Echoed, by Khaled Hosseini. @@@@@ (5 out of 5). An ambitious novel about family, loss, revenge, and new beginnings centered on the lives of two Afghan village children born in the mid-20th Century.

Cover image of "The Syndicate," a novel about Hollywood and the Mob

Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the Mob

On June 20, 1947, someone using a .30 caliber military M1 carbine pumped several bullets into the notorious mobster Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel through a window of his palatial Beverly Hills home. So died the man who has come down through history as the founder of modern Las Vegas, which he...
Across a Billion Years depicts an advanced alien civilization.

A science fiction master imagines a uniquely advanced alien civilization

Every science fiction fan must be familiar with Robert Silverberg. The man has written more than 300 books, most of them SF. He won the Grand Master Award from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFFWA) in 2003—a rare honor that goes only to the best in the business. If you read a...
Cover image of "Where Monsters Dwell," a novel about a Scandinavian serial killer

A serial killer in the land of the Midnight Sun

There's something strange about Norwegian detective Odd Singsaker. It's not his name, which is common enough in Norway, but the aftermath of the neurosurgery that removed a golf-ball-sized tumor from his brain a year ago. When he returns to work for the first day after his convalescence, he finds...

Race relations in colonial Africa through the eyes of a Swedish novelist

Among the countless books and plays written by the masterful Swedish writer Henning Mankell are nine novels and one collection of five short stories about the life and work of a troubled police detective named Kurt Wallander in the town of Ystad, Sweden. The Wallander series, which has been...
Cover image of "Cop Hater," an early police procedural

The first of the original police procedural series

On radio, then on television, we had Dragnet and a scattering of semi-documentary films such as The Naked City as well as a handful of novels that celebrated police operations. But on the printed page police procedurals didn't come of age until the publication in 1956 of Cop Hater, the first entry...
Eisenhower

An illuminating portrayal of President Eisenhower

The earthshaking events of the 1960s and the cataclysm of World War II have led many of us to think about the 1950s as a boring period when little of importance happened. It was a time between epochal events. And as Jim Newton explains in his superb biography of Dwight Eisenhower during his eight...
Cover image of "At Risk" by Dame Stella Rimington

Dame Stella Rimington’s Liz Carlyle series of top-notch espionage novels

Ex-spooks with a modicum of writing ability sometimes turn to writing spy thrillers once they've left the world of espionage. Rarely, though, do we see fictional treatments of the game come from anyone who retired at the very top of the game. Dame Stella Rimington is one of what must be only a...
The Admirals

The four men who led the US Navy in WWII

They were children of the Victorian Era. Annapolis graduates around the turn of the twentieth century. Junior officers in World War I, captains by 1927. They gained their first admiral's stars by the 1930s, and all four were near or past retirement age when war broke out. Yet they rose to the...
Cover image of "Until the Last of Me,"

Humanity’s route to the stars

First, a pair of warnings. Don't pick up this book unless you've already read the first in its series, A History of What Comes Next. Author Sylvain Neuvel has tried to make Until the Last of Me read like a standalone novel, but the effect is mixed. It's likely to be very confusing for a new...

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Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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Mal Warwick

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