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

Bombay’s sole female lawyer investigates early Bollywood

Bombay’s sole female lawyer investigates early Bollywood

The American motion picture industry, which we know as "Hollywood," began in the early 1910s when filmmakers migrated to California. By 1915, they had established a global cinema hub. But filmmaking grew early in India, too. The first Hndi-language feature film produced there,...

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NONFICTION

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!

 

Cover image of "Isaac's Storm," a book about America's deadliest hurricane

The deadliest hurricane in history?

Isaac's Storm is a detailed account of a massive hurricane that struck the coast of Texas in September 1900. The storm wreaked havoc across a wide swath of the country but devastated one city in particular. In Larson's words, "Galveston became Atlantis." Estimated reading time: 4 minutes The...
Cover image of "Heat Lightning" by John Sandford, a novel about "that f---ing Virgil Flowers"

“That f—ing Virgil Flowers,” Vietnam vets, the CIA, and a serial killer

Virgil Flowers has the highest rate of closed cases of all the agents in the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA). But he's no superhero. Virgil makes mistakes. He sometimes misreads suspects and jumps to conclusions. He misses clues. And it's those mistakes that help propel the action...
Who Cover image of "Who Is Vera Kelly?," a puzzling spy storyIs Vera Kelly?

A puzzling spy story set in Argentina in the time of the generals

At the outset of this puzzling spy story, we meet a teenage girl named Vera who may or may not have accidentally attempted suicide. It's October 1957. Vera lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland, with her mother. The two do not get along. At all. Soon, we're introduced to a young woman named Anne. It's...
Lake Success is Gary Shteyngart's latest novel.

Spoiler alert: Gary Shteyngart’s latest novel isn’t hilarious

Gary Shteyngart's three earlier novels (The Russian Debutante's Handbook, Absurdistan, and Super Sad True Love Story) as well as his memoir (Little Failure) were all hilarious. His latest novel, Lake Success, isn't. Although it's satirical to a fault, the book is fundamentally a very sad story....
Cover image of "Dark Territory," a book about cyber war

The secret history of cyber war

Occasionally, I come across a book on an important topic that's crammed with information I was able to find nowhere else -- but is a chore to read. Even though it is not an academic study but clearly intended for a general audience, Fred Kaplan's recent history of cyber war, Dark Territory, is one...
Cover image of "Machines of Loving Grace," a book about robots

Will robots seize the day?

In 1967, Richard Brautigan, the patron saint of hippiedom, published a poem in a collection under a title copied for this book. In the poem's final stanza, he envisioned a world run by robots that to so many readers then must have seemed entirely fanciful: I like to think(it has to...
Cover image of "City of Destruction,"

War with Pakistan looms in post-independence India

Four times in the less than 80 years of their joint history, India and Pakistan have gone to war. The first erupted when the ink was barely dry on the Indian Independence Act 1947 that resulted in the Partition of India into the two nations. But the cessation of the shooting war in 1948 left the...
Cover image of "Chocolate Wars"

In Chocolate Wars, what’s gone wrong with business

One of the best ways I've found to explore the factors that influence the grand sweep of modern history is to examine the stories of individual companies, industries, and commodities. And among the books I've found that have helped the most are The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It...
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...
Memory is the 10th book in a brilliant science fiction saga.

A science fiction saga that’s endlessly entertaining

Lord Miles Vorkosigan, otherwise known as Admiral Miles Naismith of the Dendarii Free Mercenary Fleet, is suffering from "an aftereffect of an acute case of death." Something went wrong in his cryorevival, and he now suffers seizures at the most inopportune moments. Miles is now 30 years old. His...

My Most Popular Reviews

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Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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Mal Warwick

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