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SCIENCE FICTION

A shattering dystopian novel that seems all too real

A shattering dystopian novel that seems all too real

Welcome to the no-longer-United States of America. Half of Florida lies underwater, and the West Coast is burning and choked with smoke. "Where JFK Airport’s big pool of light used to be, broken terminals and flooded runways" lie hidden in the heat. It's now a permanent...

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MYSTERIES & THRILLERS

Hunting the ghost of Mao Zedong in 1990s Shanghai

Hunting the ghost of Mao Zedong in 1990s Shanghai

Mao Zedong is one of a handful of people whose image overshadows a broad swath of 20th century affairs. Lenin. Stalin. Churchill. Roosevelt. Yet we Americans know relatively little about the man. For example, Amazon lists ten times the number of biographies of both Winston...

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NONFICTION

Both Democrats and Republicans have lost their way

Both Democrats and Republicans have lost their way

The pundits Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson describe themselves as liberals, and the public looks on them that way. But conservatives will find the two men subscribe to many of their long-held beliefs. That's the message in Abundance, Klein and Thompson's thought-provoking new...

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Popular Fiction

A haunting tale of love and loss spanning India and America

A haunting tale of love and loss spanning India and America

Does it sometime seem to you as though Indian novelists are muscling into the ranks of top English-language writers, making their way onto the best-seller lists and snapping up a disproportionate share of the literary awards? No? Think of Anita Desai, Arundhati Roy, Amitav...

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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 "1984" by George Orwell, a novel about the road to totalitarianism

Is the U.S. on the road to totalitarianism?

Ten days ago Donald Trump was inaugurated as President of the United States. The actions he's already taken confirm the widespread suspicions about his authoritarian personality that so many remarked upon during his campaign. Many observers saw him as the heir to Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini....
Cover image of "Shadow Prey," a novel about murder in indian country

Serial murder in Indian country

Shadow Prey, the second of John Sandford's Lucas Davenport novels, demonstrates why the long-running series has been reaching bestseller lists for nearly three decades. Sandford first introduces us to a young cop named Lawrence Duberville Clay as we observe him raping a drunken young Indian...
Cover image of "Birnam Wood," a novel about a billionaire survivalist in New Zealand

A billionaire survivalist meets environmental activists

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes Elon Musk gets all the attention these days. But back around the turn of the century, when they merged their companies to form PayPal, Musk's partner Peter Thiel was at least equally prominent. The German-American venture capitalist and entrepreneur, a billionaire...
Our Woman in Moscow

American defectors in Moscow mirror the Cambridge Five

In May 1951 two senior British Foreign Office officials disappeared. They surfaced again five years later in Moscow, having defected to the Soviet Union. It soon came to light that Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean were among a number of Cambridge University undergraduates who joined the Communist...
Cover image of "Gleanings," a novel with a hopeful view of the future

Humanity begins to recover from the Apocalypse

All too often dystopian fiction paints the future all in black and gray. But Alice Sabo's inventive Changed World series is full of life and color. After a killer pandemic late in what seems to be the twenty-first century, one community—presumably among many—painstakingly crawls its way back into...
Cover image of "Box 88,"

A top-secret Anglo American spy agency

Assume that the people who call the shots at MI6 and the CIA had grown so frustrated by the 1980s at the restrictions imposed on them by politicians that they decided to work around them. The two agencies then came together in a "special alliance" to create an off-the-books Anglo American spy...
Cover image of "The Professor and the Madman,"

How a lunatic helped create the world’s most important dictionary

When the idea surfaced in 1857, scholars thought it was impossible. A comprehensive, historical dictionary of the English language encompassing every word ever repeatedly used in print for a thousand years? Nonsense! It would take years for a team of hundreds of lexicographers to make even a dent...
Cover image of "The Trespasser," a novel about the Dublin Murder Squad

A difficult case for the Dublin Murder Squad

Plotting a mystery novel is a challenging task. A truly successful writer manages to lay out a plot that is not only suspenseful to the end but grounded in a semblance of reality. Other writers, including some of the best, occasionally resort to coincidence to make their plots work. The worst...
Cover image of "The Sentient Machine" by Amir Husain, a book about today's artificial intelligence

Today’s artificial intelligence is already transforming our lives

Artificial intelligence researchers draw a clear distinction between Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) or Weak AI, and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) or Strong AI. Weak AI is the stuff of today's Siri, self-driving cars, those annoying systems that answer you when you phone just about...
The Quiet Americans

How the CIA helped set the course for a half-century of US policy

For most readers with a passing interest in espionage, the operations of the CIA beginning in the 1950s are reasonably familiar. But that's not the case of the Agency's work in the years immediately following World War II. Scott Anderson corrects that gap in The Quiet Americans, an illuminating...

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Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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Mal Warwick

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