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How the OSS saved the Parthenon and other Greek treasures

How the OSS saved the Parthenon and other Greek treasures

Most of what appears in print today about the OSS in World War II dwells on the heroic men and women it infiltrated into France to sabotage the Nazis or in the China-Burma-India theater. Of course, "Wild Bill" Donovan's brief as head of the Office of Strategic Services was much...

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Popular Fiction

Love, disease, and self-deception: the life of Typhoid Mary

Love, disease, and self-deception: the life of Typhoid Mary

Shortly after the 19th century turned into the 20th, a medical sleuth named George Soper, whom we would today call an epidemiologist, identified a young Irish immigrant cook in New York City as an asymptomatic carrier of the pathogen that causes typhoid fever. Her name was Mary...

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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 "A Country of Vast Designs," a biography of the man who started the Mexican-American War

The President who launched the Mexican-American War

When we conjure up images of our greatest American Presidents, a handful of names invariably comes up: George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, of course; Thomas Jefferson and Franklin D. Roosevelt, too; perhaps Theodore Roosevelt as well. Today many of us would add one or more from among those who...
Cover image of "Picket Line ,"

Elmore Leonard’s long-lost novella explores farmworkers’ lives

More than half a century ago, Elmore Leonard was eking out a living writing pulp Western novels. He was about to take a sharp turn into crafting the crime novels that would establish his reputation as one of the most brilliant stylists in the genre and earn him both wide recognition and a lot of...
Cover image of "Bleeding Sea,"

This eco-thriller will keep you up at night

If you're the sort of person who worries a lot, as I am, there's no end of fodder today for your troubled brain. Climate change. The threat of nuclear war. A new pandemic. The end of democracy. And so many other grim possibilities. But, chances are, you're not worried about toxic algae. And you...
Cover image of "Clown Town,"

The best Slough House book to date?

Some readers compare Mick Herron to John le Carré. But the similarity is puzzling. The 14 books to date in the Slough House series satirize British intelligence rather than celebrate or lament its excesses, as the work of Le Carré has done so ably. Diana Taverner, who is First Desk in Herron's...
Cover image of "Slow Horses," an example of British satire

British satire about misfit spies in MI5

The spies who work out of Slough House are "a post-useful crew of misfits [who] can be stored and left to gather dust." Every one of them. MI5 has dumped them all there after they screwed up royally. Now they labor at menial tasks under the direction of a misanthropic ex-operative named Jackson...
The Satapur Moonstone is set in one of the princely states of India.

A murder mystery set in colonial India highlights the princely states

The Satapur Moonstone highlights an important aspect of Indian reality that few outsiders recognize: the princely states that help account for the country's extraordinary diversity—diversity in language, culture, cuisine, and manner of dress. Because the sense of unending differentness that...
Darwin's Radio

A brilliant novel about accelerated evolution

Evolutionary biologists tend to agree with Charles Darwin that new species can emerge only gradually over many generations. But in recent decades some have advanced a contrarian view termed punctuated equilibrium, or what I prefer to call fast-tracked evolution. They contend that evolution...
Rift

The alien invasion is coming, and we even know when

Ever since the origins of the genre in the 1920s and 30s, American science fiction writers have imagined military conflict between humans and aliens. Amazon lists more than 60,000 books of military SF. To my mind, the best of the lot (at least among those I've read) is Joe Haldeman's 1974 classic...

A brilliant novel of the French Resistance

Alan Furst homes in on the French Resistance in Red Gold, the fifth of the 13 novels in his "Night Soldiers" series that have been appearing regularly since 1988. His mastery of the moods and the political environment in Europe before and during the Second World War is unexcelled, and the flawed,...
Cover image of "Devil's Bargain," a book about Steve Bannon

How Steve Bannon sold the alt-right to Donald Trump and made history

Donald Trump has been in the White House for six months as I write. His approval rating today (July 25, 2017) stands at 38.9%, according to an average of national polls on Nate Silver's widely read blog, FiveThirtyEight. His disapproval rating is nearly 20 points higher. These numbers...

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Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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Mal Warwick

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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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