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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!

 

Cover image of "Vienna Spies," a novel set in wartime Vienna

A stirring tale of spies in wartime Vienna

In The Secret War, his illuminating revisionist history of secret intelligence in World War II, the British journalist Max Hastings questions the value of what has come to be called "humint," the product of spies working undercover. In Hastings' view, spies had little effect on the outcome of the...
Cover image of "A Fatal Grace," a novel by Louise Penny

Detective fiction by Louise Penny that rivals the best Scandinavia can offer

Do you enjoy detective fiction? Check out this one by Louse Penny. An unpopular woman, a newcomer to town, is murdered in the middle of the day at a popular sports event in rural Quebec. She was mysteriously electrocuted sitting in a lawn chair on the sidelines. The local constable...
Cover image of "The Trials of Harry S. Truman,"

A revealing new biography of Harry Truman

Joe Biden is the 46th in the line of US Presidents who have served since 1789. Every list of the greatest among them invariably includes George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and (usually) Franklin D. Roosevelt. There is no consensus among historians about the men who fall into the second tier. But...
Cover image of "The Guns at Last Light," the third book in a trilogy about the greatest catastrophe in history

“The greatest catastrophe in human history”

If you were born after 1950 or so, and you think at all about the Second World War, it’s probably little more to you than an event shrouded in history -- a big one, of course, but one that ended two generations ago and is now just one of many terrible episodes in a century prone to violence....
Cover image of "The Girl from Venice," a novel about Nazi generals

Film stars, partisans, and Nazi generals in 1945 Italy

Martin Cruz Smith is best known for the eight novels featuring Moscow police investigator Arkady Renko. I've read and admired them all. (You can find reviews of three of those novels here, here, and here.) However, before creating the character of Arkady Renko in 1981, Cruz had written 17 previous...
Cover image of "The Porkchoppers," a novel about dirty politics

A brilliant and witty novel about dirty politics

If you're looking for insightful writing about dirty politics, the novels of Ross Thomas have no peer. In The Porkchoppers, Thomas portrays the behind-the-scenes reality of a high-stakes labor union election, and it ain't pretty. The picture is likely to be exaggerated through the lens of the...
Cover image of "A World in Disarray," a book about foreign policy

American foreign policy in a “nonpolar” world

It would be difficult to identify anyone other than Henry Kissinger who represents the tradition of America's bipartisan foreign policy more fully than Richard A. Haass. Haass is the longtime president of the Council on Foreign Relations, which comes as close as any institution to sitting at the...
Cover image of "Darwin's Children," a novel about the posthuman future

A novel view of the posthuman future

The tagline on the cover of Darwin's Children reads "Evolution has changed the face of the world." In the sequel to his brilliant 1999 novel, Darwin's Radio, Greg Bear now spells out the ways in which a dramatic event in the evolution of the human race has laid the foundation for a posthuman...
Cover image of "Original Sin,"

How Joe Biden’s family and aides covered up his steady decline

Close observers could see signs of President Joe Biden's physical and neurological decline even before he took office in January 2021. But, as journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson detail in their explosive new book, Original Sin, "what was going on in private was worse." Far worse, as even a...

The Chicago Mafia, “body-laundering,” and the Talmud

A legendary hit man for the Chicago Mafia named Sal Cupertine is spirited off to Las Vegas in a refrigerated meat truck after a botched job. There, after six months of radical plastic surgery and cramming with the Torah and the Talmud, he resurfaces as Rabbi David Cohen in a thriving suburban...

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Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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