The Latest

Books about extraordinary women

Books about extraordinary women

You won’t recognize some of the names on this list of exceptional women. Most were little known even in their own time. They represent a wide range of activities, from espionage to politics to science and to running their countries. But what they have in common with the three...

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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

NONFICTION

Books about extraordinary women

Books about extraordinary women

You won’t recognize some of the names on this list of exceptional women. Most were little known even in their own time. They represent a wide range of activities, from espionage to politics to science and to running their countries. But what they have in common with the three...

read more

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 "The Book of the Unnamed Midwife," a feminist story

A powerful feminist story in a dystopian landscape

Meg Elison's debut novel, The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, won the prestigious Philip K. Dick Award and was included among the Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year, 2016, and Amazon Best Books of the Year, 2016. It's another sign that science fiction has come of age, no longer confined to a...
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...
The Calculating Stars is an example of good hard science fiction.

This novel shows just how good hard science fiction can be

Reading as many books as I do, I find it's increasingly difficult for a book to fully capture my attention. Three to five books per week for several years now will do that to you. So when I come across one that's truly difficult to put down, that's worthy of note. And the first entry in Mary...
Cover image of "The Crossing" by Michael Connelly, a clever police procedural

A police procedural and courtroom drama rolled into one excellent novel

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes Among contemporary American crime novelists Michael Connelly stands out for the consistent excellence of his long-running series of police procedurals featuring detective Harry Bosch. His novels about Bosch’s half-brother, Mickey Haller, the “Lincoln Lawyer,”...
Cover image of "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet," a brilliant historical novel

A beautifully written tale of love, courage, and faith

Imagine yourself in a land far, far away, in a time long passed from memory. Now imagine this: Napoleon Bonaparte is striding across Europe, and the fledgling American republic is edging ever closer toward the expansionist vision of Thomas Jefferson. The Dutch East India Company is gasping its...
Miracle at St. Anna

Black soldiers on the front line in Tuscany in World War II

This book is a work of fiction inspired by real events and real people." So writes James McBride in an author's note that precedes the text. He continues: "It draws upon the individual and collective experiences of black soldiers who served in the Serchio Valley and Apuane Alps of Italy during...
Cover image of "Quantum Space,"

A breakthrough in quantum physics opens new vistas

Quantum mechanics puzzled even Einstein, and string theory later added layers of complexity. Just try imagining ten dimensions, or, for that matter, even four-dimensional space. And, no, time is not the fourth dimension. They're all spatial dimensions, like height, width, and depth. Try it. You'll...
Cover image of "The Redeemers," a novel filled with Southern-fried violence

Good ol’ boys and Southern-fried violence

Quinn Colson is a classic action hero. He was a sergeant in the Army Rangers, serving for 13 deployments over ten years in Iraq and Afghanistan. Several years previously he returned home to Tibbehah County in northern Mississippi to pick up where he left off with his high-school girlfriend, now...
The Foreign Correspondent is a superb historical espionage novel.

From Alan Furst, a superb historical espionage novel

Late 1938 in Europe was a time of dislocation and growing fear. In Germany, Kristallnacht signaled the end of hope for any Jew smart enough to understand its implications. Austria and Czechoslovakia were  now part of the German Reich, adding to the flow of refugees. In Spain, Generalissimo Franco...
The Great Influenza is an account of the 1918 flu epidemic.

A brilliant account of the 1918 flu epidemic

A century ago a pandemic disease far more lethal than COVID-19 killed an estimated fifty to one hundred million people around the world—as many as one out of every twenty people then alive. The 1918 flu epidemic erupted during a war that had already killed tens of millions and at a time when...

My Most Popular Reviews

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Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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Mal Warwick

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