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Ken Follett’s monumental saga of the First World War

Ken Follett’s monumental saga of the First World War

No one is still alive with any adult memory of World War I, which ended a century ago. So when we think of the events that have shaped the world we live in today it's likely World War II looms large. But its antecedent three decades earlier may have had greater long-term...

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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 "Funny Girl" by Nick Hornby, a funny story

From Nick Hornby, a very funny story that’s not all laughs

Here's Nick Hornby again, writing about a gorgeous, buxom blonde who flees a beauty pageant in Blackpool without accepting the crown she's won. She is also very, very clever. All she wants is to be the second coming on TV of her idol, Lucille Ball, and make people laugh. (Note to young readers:...
Cover image of "The Lacquer Screen,"

A detective in Tang Dynasty China goes undercover

Western readers of suspense fiction look to the work of 19th century authors Wilkie Collins and Edgar Allen Poe for the origins of the detective novel. But in fact there are antecedents in China preceding the two men's work by hundreds of years. Ming Dynasty stories appeared based on historical...
Cover image of "Hollywood Moon," a novel about the Hollywood police

These Hollywood police procedurals launched serious police drama

Joseph Wambaugh, who recently passed away at the age of 88, wrote both novels and nonfiction about police and crime in Los Angeles for more than 50 years. While still at work as an LAPD detective sergeant in 1971, he wrote his first novel, The New Centurions. Two years later I read The Onion...
Cover image of "When Red Is Black," a novel about China in transition.

This gripping crime novel shows China in transition

When Red Is Black paints a vivid picture of China in transition. Chief Inspector Chen Cao is an "emerging cadre" in the Chinese Communist Party, a published poet of some renown, and the head of the politically sensitive Special Investigations Squad of the Shanghai Police Bureau. Many regard him as...
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 "Shattered," a book about the 2016 election

Why Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election

How did Hillary Clinton lose an election she was so widely expected to win? How did Donald Trump win that election despite abundant evidence that he was unprepared and ill-suited to hold the office? Two journalists, Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, attempt to answer those questions in Shattered:...
Lethal Seasons

The Apocalypse unfolds in this gripping science fiction novel

Imagine the apocalypse. The word may conjure up visions of a nuclear holocaust, a killer pandemic, an asteroid collision, or cyberwar so intense that it sets back civilization by a century or more. Usually, when we ponder an apocalyptic future we think of a single, overriding cause—and a change so...
A Spy at the Heart of the Third Reich

The little-known tale of the top spy in Nazi Germany

One of the reasons the resistance to Nazism within Germany itself was so meager was the refusal of the Allies to support the men and women who opposed Hitler. Still, many brave souls persisted nonetheless, hoping to overturn the Third Reich and reach a peace agreement with the Americans and...
Cover image of "Caleb's Crossing," a novel about Harvard's first Native American graduate

In Colonial America, the first Native American goes to Harvard

A review of Caleb’s Crossing, by Geraldine Brooks. @@@@@ (5 out of 5). Caleb’s Crossing is history told as it should always be: vivid, engrossing, and emotionally honest. In relating Caleb’s story, Brooks paints an indelible picture of the early decades of colonial life in Eastern Massachusetts. She casts a bright light on the troubled, and eventually tragic, relationship between the colonists and the Indians, and explores an aspect of that history much less commonly discussed: the rebellion of so many colonists against the rigid, narrow-minded regime of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Cover image of "The Ninth Metal,"

This superhero story goes off the rails

By all accounts, what came to be called science fiction first appeared in print in 1818 with the publication of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Later efforts in the 19th and early 20th centuries by Jules Verne in France and H. G. Wells in England imagined feats beyond the boundaries of known science...

My Most Popular Reviews

Weekly Reviews Delivered to You!

Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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Mal Warwick

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