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How the OSS saved the Parthenon and other Greek treasures

How the OSS saved the Parthenon and other Greek treasures

Most of what appears in print today about the OSS in World War II dwells on the heroic men and women it infiltrated into France to sabotage the Nazis or in the China-Burma-India theater. Of course, "Wild Bill" Donovan's brief as head of the Office of Strategic Services was much...

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Popular Fiction

Love, disease, and self-deception: the life of Typhoid Mary

Love, disease, and self-deception: the life of Typhoid Mary

Shortly after the 19th century turned into the 20th, a medical sleuth named George Soper, whom we would today call an epidemiologist, identified a young Irish immigrant cook in New York City as an asymptomatic carrier of the pathogen that causes typhoid fever. Her name was Mary...

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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!

 

Here and Now and Then is a promising science fiction debut.

A novel treatment of time travel in this promising science fiction debut

Time travel is one of the themes most commonly found in classic science fiction. But it's taken a back seat in recent years to dystopian novels and space opera, not to mention epic fantasy (which I don't consider science fiction at all). Of course, time travel back to the past has no basis in...
brain implant: Amped by Daniel H. Wilson

Want to buy a brain implant? Think twice

A review of Amped, by Daniel H. Wilson. @@@@ (4 out of 5). A thriller set in the near future when brain implants “amplify” the brains and bodies of half a million Americans — and all hell breaks loose.

One of China's top three suspense authors wrote Death Notice.

A detective novel by one of “China’s top three suspense authors”

Zhou Haohui, author of Death Notice, is referred to in the biography at the end of the novel as "one of the top three suspense authors in China today." The statement leaves me puzzled. Perhaps something's been lost in the translation from the Chinese to English, but it's hard to believe that this...
Cover image of "Chaos Monkeys," a memoir by a Silicon Valley techie

Confessions of a Silicon Valley techie

Hope King ran her review of Chaos Monkeys on CNN Money under the title "New book compares Facebook's culture to fascism but fails to prove it." The subtitle is equally revealing, concluding that the book "reads like four year's worth of Medium posts from a scorned man." She has nothing but score...
Cover image of "Grandfather Anonymous," a dystopian techno-thriller

A dangerous old man in dystopia

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes Most genre fiction is formulaic. Mysteries may be detective stories, police procedurals, cozy mysteries, and so forth. Romance novels fall into categories of their own. And science fiction encompasses space travel, dystopia, First Contact, military science...
Cover image of "The Populist Explosion," a book about Donald Trump and populism

Donald Trump: populism, or fascism?

The unexpected emergence of Donald Trump as a major-party candidate for the White House has triggered a great deal of punditry about how the Republican Party managed to put forward such a bigoted and ignorant champion. Speculation has swirled around the nature of the political forces he...
By the Light of Burning Dreams

Chronicling the incomplete second American Revolution

Americans have short memories. Our failure to read history leads us to believe that nothing in our past could equal the dangers posed by the crises that threaten us today. We forget those times when the nation's very existence hung in the balance. 1776, when the American project might well have...
The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick

In “The Facebook Effect,” the story behind “The Social Network”

If you're an American and you have a connection to the Internet, there's roughly a one-in-three chance you have a Facebook page. If you're Canadian, the chances are nearly one in two. Worldwide, the number of Facebook members is fast approaching ten percent of the global population. Clearly, those...
The Kingmaker's Daughter

Nothing noble about the nobility in 15th century England

She was the second daughter of the richest and most powerful man in England, more mighty than the king himself. He was Richard Neville, my namesake, known throughout the land as "Warwick the Kingmaker." And during her childhood, he deposed one king and placed another on the throne. It was all part...
Cover image of "The Martian Contingency," a novel about the famous Lady Astronaut

The Lady Astronaut moves to Mars

Mary Robinette Kowal's Lady Astronaut series sprawls across the years from 1952 to 1970 and beyond. The saga takes shape in four novels and several shorter stories (which have yet to be collected in a single volume). Kowal guides us through the career of the remarkable Dr. Elma York, a child...

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Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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…includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.

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