The Latest

SCIENCE FICTION

MYSTERIES & THRILLERS

Those lady detectives in Botswana save baby elephants

Why, I keep asking myself, do I continue to read these books about two ladies who operate as private detectives in Gaborone, Botswana? After all, they're not really detectives. They don't investigate crime and almost never encounter the police. They "help solve people's...

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NONFICTION

He ran the morgue on 9/11. The job took years.

He ran the morgue on 9/11. The job took years.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Shiya Ribowsky walked to work. It was a beautiful day, and he was in no hurry. As director of identifications at New York City’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME), he knew death keeps its own schedule. Then the first plane struck...

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Popular Fiction

Laughs in sci-fi? P. G. Wodehouse did humor better.

Laughs in sci-fi? P. G. Wodehouse did humor better.

The legendary English humorist Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (1881-1975), known to readers as P. G., wrote about 100 books in a career that spanned much of the 20th century. His output included 71 novels, 24 collections of short stories, 42 plays, three memoirs, and a lot...

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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.

Check out our rotating random selection here, culled from throughout this site.

Happy reading!

 

The Madonnas of Leningrad is about the Siege of Leningrad.

A novel about memory evokes the siege of Leningrad

Americans tend to think that the United States won World War II. Some even seem to believe we did so single-handedly. But while that may be substantially true in the case of the Pacific War against Imperial Japan, it was most assuredly not so in Europe. For one thing, the war there had been raging...
Cover image of "The Eighth Dwarf," a mystery about a dwarf

Snow White wouldn’t like this dwarf

It's 1946. Captain Minor Jackson has just mustered out of the OSS, which had been disbanded one month after Japan's surrender in World War II. Jackson was looking for an easy way to make money -- a lot of money -- when a chance encounter with a Romanian dwarf named Nicolae Ploscaru opens up what...
Cover image of "The Last Detective," a novel by Peter Lovesey

A murder mystery by Peter Lovesey that’s suspenseful to the end

The Last Detective, published in 1991, was the first in a series of Peter Lovesey's 15 murder mysteries featuring detective Peter Diamond. Earlier this year I read and reviewed the fifteenth, Down Among the Dead Men, which I enjoyed enough to send me back to the early days in the series. A...
Cover image of "Present Danger" by Stella Rimington, one of the best spy novels recently

Do all the best spy novels come from Britain?

John le Carré. Eric Ambler. Graham Greene. Ian Fleming. Len Deighton. Frederick Forsyth. Somerset Maugham. Charles Cumming. Ken Follett. Alex Gerlis. Philip Kerr. Is that enough names to make the case that the best spy novels come from Britain? (Okay, maybe just in the English language.) Not that...
Surveillance Valley reveals the secret military history of the Internet.

Shocking revelations: the secret military history of the Internet

The secret military history of the Internet comes to light in a powerful new book. It's well known that the Internet was birthed by the Pentagon. Originally called the ARPANET, the name reflected its origin in the military's Advanced Research Projects Agency created late in the Eisenhower...
Cover image of 'Kingmaker,"

She helped jump-start the WWII Anglo-American partnership

That cover photo does not do her justice. Pamela Churchill Harriman (née Digby, 1920-99) was one of the great beauties of the Anglo-American world well into her seventies, and other photos reveal that. She was ridiculed) throughout most of her life as a courtesan, having slept with hundreds of...
An AI expert worries about the future in 2062.

An AI expert worries about the robots of the future

I believe that one day we will create machines that think," writes AI researcher Toby Walsh in his new book, 2062. "We will invent machines that are superior to us. They will be stronger, faster and more intelligent than us." However, he notes, they will think in ways very different from us. "A...
Cover image of 'The Mission," one of the best books about the CIA

Best nonfiction books about the CIA

Today, the CIA lies at the center of a vast complex of eighteen intelligence agencies. The so-called "intelligence community" boasts a combined budget of more than $100 billion annually. That's one million dollars 100,000 times over. And though the Central Intelligence Agency commands only a...
Cover image of "A Rage for Order," a book about the Arab Spring

A postmortem for the Arab Spring

Historians are fond of advancing the notion that no major event in human affairs can be fully understood until many years later, when the major actors have passed from the scene and long-suppressed archival records finally come to light. Journalists sometimes dispute this contention, citing their...

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Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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