The Latest

Corruption at the epicenter of Silicon Valley

Corruption at the epicenter of Silicon Valley

In 2022, a 17-year-old computer wizard named Theo Baker entered Stanford University. Besotted with idealism, he'd come to California believing that Stanford could enable him to make the world a better place. As a "hobby," he volunteered for the Stanford Daily student newspaper....

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SCIENCE FICTION

MYSTERIES & THRILLERS

Fossil hunters in Utah threaten Navajo police

Fossil hunters in Utah threaten Navajo police

When Tony Hillerman died at the age of 83 in 2008, he left behind an extensive literary legacy that included the 18 books in his award-series of Navajo detective novels. The Leaphorn and Chee books won him plaudits throughout the world and made him a wealthy man. Five years...

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NONFICTION

Corruption at the epicenter of Silicon Valley

Corruption at the epicenter of Silicon Valley

In 2022, a 17-year-old computer wizard named Theo Baker entered Stanford University. Besotted with idealism, he'd come to California believing that Stanford could enable him to make the world a better place. As a "hobby," he volunteered for the Stanford Daily student newspaper....

read more

Popular Fiction

She was a pioneering astronomer. In the 18th century.

She was a pioneering astronomer. In the 18th century.

Women did not begin to gain any measure of equality with men until sometime in the 20th century. So it is always inspiring to read about women whose accomplishments were so outstanding that even under the most egregious pressure of misogyny they made their mark on history. One...

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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!

 

Under a White Sky

In the Anthropocene, the chickens come home to roost

For at least 200,000 years, homo sapiens enjoyed the bounty of the Earth, rendering only minimal damage to the planet. That began to change with the advent of the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century. Achim Steiner, Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme,...
Cover image of "The Ghosts of Belfast," a novel about war in Northern Ireland

A grim story of war and betrayal in Northern Ireland

A review of The Ghosts of Belfast, by Stuart Neville. @@@@ (4 out of 5). You may never have read a murder mystery like this one. The protagonist, Gerry Fegan, is a former hit man for the IRA responsible for the deaths of twelve people (the “ghosts” of the title), and it’s never much of a mystery when he begins killing again. The mystery lies deeper.

Cover image of "Strangers in Their Own Land," a book about Trump voters

What Trump voters believe: a Berkeley sociologist goes to the source

In her ninth book, UC Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild confronts her alarm "at the increasingly hostile split in our nation between two political camps." Strangers in Their Own Land, a Finalist for the National Book Award, reflects five years of Hochschild's field research in...
Cover image of "Generation of Vipers," an alien invasion novel

A compelling new alien invasion novel

Fair warning: before you read Generation of Vipers, I strongly suggest you pick up a copy of Wherever Seeds May Fall, the 15th entry in Peter Cawdron's long-running series of standalone First Contact novels. (I reviewed it at One surprise after another in this brilliant First Contact novel.) It's...
Cover image of "Ghosts," a novel about First Contact with aliens

Human nature complicates First Contact

Beware: the title is misleading. Peter Cawdron's novel, Ghosts, is not a ghost story. It's hard science fiction, the 24th in his series of standalone novels exploring the innumerable ways that First Contact with aliens might play out. He's written about what seems like every conceivable...
Cover image of "The Threads Remain,"

A young man in 1957 searches for his birth parents in Nazi Germany

The tagline on the cover is tantalizing. "A young man uncovers a hidden past," it reads, "while another becomes its echo." The resulting dual-timeline story, grounded in 1957 and 1941-45, traces the experiences of two German teenagers and their families. One seeks 12 years after World War II to...
Cover image of "American Heiress," a book about a famous kidnapping

The kidnapping that shook America

In early 1974, the United States was in turmoil. Richard Nixon was about to be impeached, the Vietnam War was still grinding on, the OPEC Oil Embargo was underway, and an average of 2,000 bombs had been exploded in the country in each of the three preceding years. Then, on February 4, a...
Cover image of "In the Garden of Beasts," a book about American anti-semitism during the rise of Hitler's Germany

Why the U.S. failed to speak out against Hitler’s rise

In the years 1933-41, a passion for isolationism gripped the American psyche, keeping President Roosevelt from speaking out against the growth of Nazism and the ever-tightening vise of oppression and violence directed at Germany's tiny Jewish minority (less than one percent of the population)....

In English translation, an award-winning French thriller is disappointing

When a book comes along with rave reviews and a prestigious award attached, I tend to feel I'm almost obligated to love it. But that didn't work in this case. (In reality, it's never a sure thing.) The French thriller, Alex, by Pierre Lemaitre, tells the tale in alternating chapters of a beautiful...
Cover image of "The Courier," a novel grounded in the Nazi occupation of Norway

Murder and intrigue in Nazi-occupied Norway

Oslo, August 2015. An old woman named Turid chances across an entry in an auctioneer's booklet. It's a bracelet with a minimum bid of one hundred thousand kroner, or about $10,000 today. "It is forty-eight years since she last saw her bracelet." So Turid digs out the old papers and presents them...

My Most Popular Reviews

Weekly Reviews Delivered to You!

Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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Mal Warwick

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