In a region of Cameroon populated by people outsiders call pygmies, a Danish development project has gone off the rails. Then, shortly after a visitor from the Danish foreign ministry is glimpsed on a visit, the local liaison between the project and the Danes is brutally murdered. Back home in...

Someone has dumped the body of a young woman outside an acute-care hospital in west Los Angeles. There's nothing on the corpse to identify the woman. But her fingerprints are on file from a background check where she worked. She's "Marissa Adrianne French, twenty-five years old, five-five, one...

A review of Rippling: How Social Entrepreneurs Spread Innovation Throughout the World, by Beverly Schwartz. @@@@@ (5 out of 5). Stories of 18 outstanding Ashoka Fellows and the pioneering work they’re doing on five continents.

At least four books are in print under the title They Fought Alone. The best-known was the work of Col. Maurice Buckmaster, who led the French section of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) from March 1941 to the end of World War II. Journalist and broadcaster Charles Glass, author of the most...

What? Another book about Donald Trump? I've already reviewed nearly two dozen of them. So, what could possibly move me to read another one? Well, three things, as it turns out. First, author Mark Leibovich is one of the funniest observers of American politics I've come across in recent years....

One of the pivotal events in the evolution of Great Britain as we know it today occurred nearly 900 years ago during the era known as "The Anarchy." From 1138 to 1153, what are today England and France experienced continuous turmoil, as two contenders battled for the throne in the first English...

Ten years ago millions of Americans and Soviet citizens had died in a nuclear war. Washington DC, Miami, San Diego, and several other cities lie in rubble. The United States is now a second-rate power, dependent on aid from Great Britain. Chafing under martial law, the survivors struggle to feed...

A review of Florence of Arabia, by Christopher Buckley. @@@ (3 out of 5). A former State Department Middle East expert attempts to set off a feminist revolution in a kingdom closely resembling Saudi Arabia.

By all accounts, Donna Leon's long-running series of detective novels featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti is widely popular, even loved. I wish I could understand why. Falling in Love, the 24th installment in Leon's series, is an insipid tale of an opera diva and her violence-prone stalker. I...

A review of Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. @@@@@ (5 out of 5). Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo seek a pragmatic path between the extreme positions advanced by economists Jeffrey Sachs and William Easterly. Sachs advocates massive foreign aid. Easterly asserts it does more harm than good.