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SCIENCE FICTION

MYSTERIES & THRILLERS

Porfiry Rostnikov’s last case

Porfiry Rostnikov’s last case

Before his death in 2009, the prolific detective novelist Stuart Kaminsky wrote 16 police procedurals featuring a Moscow investigator named Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov. The books span the years 1981 to 2008. They encompass the final years of Communist rule and the first two...

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NONFICTION

20 top nonfiction books about World War II

20 top nonfiction books about World War II

If you've been reading my reviews for very long, you're aware that the World War II era holds special fascination for me. This might have something to do with the fact that I was born then—in fact, about six months before the USA entered the war. Or maybe it's just because it...

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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!

 

The Pictures

A riveting tale of corruption in Hollywood’s Golden Age

On August 25, 1939, MGM's make-or-break production of The Wizard of Oz premiered at Grauman's Theater in Los Angeles. The picture represented the pinnacle of all that Louis B. Mayer aspired to project for the company. It was a wholesome film, a picture for the whole family, a celebration of the...

An unsparing tale of life in the living hell of North Korea

A review of The Orphan Master’s Son, by Adam Johnson. @@@@ (4 out of 5). A novel that digs beneath the artificial veneer of life in North Korea to examine its the mindless lives of its people, from the lowliest convict to the Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il, himself.

Cover image of "The Tatas,"

How India’s Tata family built modern India

With a population of 1.38 billion and the fifth largest economy in the world, India is a giant among nations. Yet a single family has played an outsize role in building the economic engine that makes India what it is today. In no other large nation has any family loomed so large in modern history...
Cover image of "The Mao Case,"

Hunting the ghost of Mao Zedong in 1990s Shanghai

Mao Zedong is one of a handful of people whose image overshadows a broad swath of 20th century affairs. Lenin. Stalin. Churchill. Roosevelt. Yet we Americans know relatively little about the man. For example, Amazon lists ten times the number of biographies of both Winston Churchill and Franklin...
The Last Astronaut is a classic First Contact novel.

In a classic First Contact novel, astronauts meet . . . something very strange

If I'd taken the trouble to check out the author of this novel before picking it up to read, I probably would have decided not to do so. The man writes horror fiction, and I abhor horror fiction—in books, films, on television, or anywhere else, for that matter. Although The Last Astronaut does fit...
Last Boat Out of Shanghai

Four young Chinese experience WWII and Revolution

When future historians look back at the most consequential events of the century just past, it seems likely they'll place four or five episodes at the top of their lists. The Russian and Chinese Revolutions, of course. The thirty-year war that encompassed the two conflicts we now call the First...
Cover image of "The Innovator's Dilemma"

The Innovator’s Dilemma: why do successful firms fail?

Chances are, you're reading this review on an example of disruptive technology. An iPhone or other smartphone. An iPad or a notebook computer. Or simply a laptop. Every one of these devices turned its industry upside down when it was introduced, driving established companies to the brink of...
Cover image of "Fancy Bear Goes Phishing," a history of hackers and hacking

An entertaining history of hackers and hacking

As Scott Shapiro points out in the opening pages of his history of hackers and hacking, "there are at least 15 billion computers for only 8 billion people." And most of us eight billion seem to live in constant fear that some malicious 15-year-old kid in Belarus is going to wipe out everything on...
Dead Land casts the private eye as investigative reporter.

V. I. Warshawski: the private eye as investigative reporter

Private eye V. I. Warshawski is the fictional creation of Chicago novelist Sara Paretsky, but she stands in for that city's best and brightest investigative reporters. Yes, Vic, as she prefers to be known, is a detective, not a journalist. But the cases she pursues, often without being paid to do...
Cover image of "Whirlwind: War in the Pacific," a book that highlights the blunders in the Pacific War

When the US won the War in the Pacific

Consider the Pacific Ocean. It's the largest expanse of territory on the planet, spanning 63.8 million square miles. That's seventeen times the territory of the United States, and ten times that of Russia, by far the largest nation on Earth. Should we wonder, then, why fleets of Japanese and...

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