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!

 

Lords of Finance

How the gold standard caused the Great Depression

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes Most of us Americans are taught in school that the stock market crash on Wall Street caused the Great Depression. Beginning on Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929, we're told, the Depression didn't properly end in the United States until the mobilization for World War...
Googled by Ken Auletta

Ken Auletta takes us behind the scenes at an extraordinary company

Ken Auletta monitors the media for the New Yorker magazine, and his writing frequently brings new perspective our understanding of the changes that are upending the world's information sources at an alarming rate. "Googled" brings us face to face with several of the remarkable individuals who are...
The Order of the Day

The men who made Adolf Hitler’s war possible

There's something strange about the French. I suspect that any American publisher would have rejected this peculiar little book. But it wasn't just published in France—it won the country's most prestigious literary award, the Prix Goncourt. And this despite the fact that in fewer than 150 pages...
Cover image of "Demon Copperhead," a novel about the drug epidemic

An engrossing novel of the drug epidemic

Charles Dickens's semi-autobiographical novel, David Copperfield, appeared in 1850. The book, his favorite among the nineteen novels he published during his lifetime, plumbed the depths of his difficult upbringing in Victorian England. It has been adapted to film or television fourteen times over...
Cover image of "Forgotten Ally," a book about China's role in the war of 1937-45, one of the most significant events of World War II

The 10 most consequential events of World War II

China played a huge role in World War II, if only because it occupied millions of Japanese soldiers in a futile attempt to subdue one of the biggest countries in the world. The virtue of history is that it affords us perspective—not just the distance that the passage of time occasions but the...
Shards of Honor is one of the best books in the complete Vorkosigan Saga.

The pleasures of reading the complete Vorkosigan Saga

Miles Vorkosigan is the central figure in most of the sixteen novels (to date) that comprise the complete Vorkosigan Saga, several books of which have won Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards for Lois McMaster Bujold. Bujold won the Hugo Award four times, matching the record achieved by Robert A....
A Rising Man is the first in a series of historical detective novels.

The Wyndham and Banerjee historical detective novels set in colonial India

The weight of history began crashing down on the British Raj in World War I, as these exceptionally well executed historical detective novels make abundantly clear. Victoria's "jewel in the crown" had sent more than one million soldiers to fight for God and country—England, not India—chiefly on...
Cover image of "Empire of AI,"

Will artificial intelligence help us or hurt us?

Chances are, you'd never come across the term "artificial intelligence" as recently as a decade ago. And even if you had, it was probably either in reading science fiction or working in the tech industry. For the rest of us, AI was far off the radar screen. Yet today, you can't read or view the...
Cover image of "Gilded Rage," the story of Silicon Valley's partnership with Donald Trump

How Elon Musk and his tech bros went nuts over Donald Trump

In 1998, three ambitious Silicon Valley entrepreneurs established a startup called PayPal. These three hustlers—Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, and Luke Nosek—later merged with Elon Musk's company and enlisted eight or nine others. Together, they became the PayPal Mafia. The company survived the tech...
Cover image of "Murder in Belleville," a well-crafted murder mystery

A well-crafted murder mystery set amid a refugee crisis

At a time when the current refugee crisis dominates the headlines in Europe (though only when the Greek financial debacle doesn't crowd it out), it's fascinating to read about an earlier time in European history when the French people, in particular, seemed just as obsessed with refugees as they...

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Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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Mal Warwick

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