The Latest

SCIENCE FICTION

First Contact deep in the Amazon rainforest

First Contact deep in the Amazon rainforest

What can I say about a book that could have been great but isn't? In Entropy, the 31st entry in his long-running series of standalone novels about First Contact with alien intelligence, Australian author Peter Cawdron tells a gripping story about the crash of a private jet deep...

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MYSTERIES & THRILLERS

NONFICTION

They grew the country’s vegetables

They grew the country’s vegetables

If you watched the HBO drama Succession, you'll have a sense of what happened to the once-famous Seabrook frozen-food dynasty. Succession features a tyrannical "self-made" founder, hideous corporate crime, cynical right-wing politics, sibling rivalry, backstabbing, and worse....

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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!

 

The Bellini Card by Jason Goodwin

A very odd couple solves murders in this historical novel

It's 1840. A eunuch in service to the Ottoman sultan is, improbably, an accomplished detective, a gifted hand-to-hand fighter, and even a lover of women (or, at least, one woman) in this fanciful but flawed mystery story. Dr. Watson to Yashim's Sherlock Holmes is a Polish Count ejected from his...
Cover image of "The Dry," a novel about multiple murder

Multiple murder in the Australian outback

If you've ever been to the desert in central Australia, you'll find it easier to envision the setting in Jane Harper's thriller, The Dry: the featureless landscape, the stifling heat, the desolation, the sheer loneliness that the landscape inflicts on you. The novel is set somewhere south of the...
Cover image of "An Excess Male" by Maggie Shen King, a great science fiction novel

A great science fiction novel set in a future totalitarian China

China’s one-child policy, introduced in 1979, was in force until 2016, when the government instituted a two-child policy. The result has been a large imbalance between the numbers of male and female children. As of 2007, according to a BBC report citing the country’s National Population and Family...
The Invention of Yesterday will help you understand human history.

Understanding human history as an extraterrestrial might view it

If you think history is a cold recitation of dates and the names of kings and battles, you owe it to yourself to check out Big History. And the best introduction I've found to that fascinating new field is Tamim Ansary's brilliant 50,000-year survey, The Invention of Yesterday. Unlike many of the...
Rule of Capture

A lawyer confronts dystopia in the making

In dystopian fiction, some authors envision a future along the lines of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, a nightmarish post-apocalyptic world in which a trickle of survivors struggle to survive. Others picture a time yet to come when a tyrannical state enslaves those unlucky enough to lie within its...

Join archaeologists at work around the world

To say that Annalee Newitz's interests are eclectic grossly understates the point. They—Newitz's personal pronouns are they/their/theirs—are the author of two science fiction novels and two works of nonfiction that sprawl across a broad swath of issues and preoccupations. Newitz has also edited or...
Cover image of "The African Equation," a book by one of the best known African writers

African writers aren’t all world-class

Here's a story that could have been worked into a terrific novel in the hands of a writer with a trifle of self-restraint. Unfortunately, Yasmina Khadra, reputedly one of Africa's greatest writers, displays none of that. Every one of his characters, from a German physician to a passel of Somali or...
This is a Nancy Pelosi biography.

A critical but admiring biography of Nancy Pelosi

She has one of the most recognizable names in America. Yet far too few Americans have more than the most trivial understanding of who she is and where she comes from. And that ignorance is compounded by a relentless, years-long smear campaign by the Right Wing—a campaign that has only intensified...
Cover image of "Tribe," a story of international intrigue

A story of international intrigue that could have been better told

A review of Tribe, by James Bruno. @@@ (3 out of 5). Following a botched mission to Afghanistan, veteran CIA agent Harry Brennan comes to believe that someone in the agency tried to have him killed in the field to conceal a plot to shift U.S. foreign policy to the benefit of Big Oil.

Cover image of "A Canticle for Leibowitz," a classic dystopian novel

This classic dystopian novel is steeped in Catholicism

Author William Gibson famously made the point that any science fiction story, no matter how far in the future it's set, is really about the present. After all, no author can fail to reflect the prevailing values and preoccupations of their time and place. And that truth becomes abundantly clear...

My Most Popular Reviews

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Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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Mal Warwick

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