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 "Bluebird, Bluebird" by Attica Locke

A compelling tale of murder, race, and family secrets by Attica Locke

Two bodies have turned up in quick succession in a small town in hardscrabble East Texas. The sheriff is inclined to treat them as unconnected. But not so Darren Matthews, a Texas Ranger who has come to town at the urging of a friend in the FBI who suspects larger forces at work there. An African...
Instanbul Passage by Joseph Kanon is set in post-War Istanbul.

Romance, intrigue, and betrayal in post-War Istanbul

A review of Istanbul Passage, by Joseph Kanon. @@@@ (4 out of 5). Relates the tale of Leon Bauer, an American businessman in Turkey who has persuaded a friend in the U.S. consulate to hire him for special espionage assignments, helping smuggle Jews out of Romania and on to Palestine.

Cover image of "Lightless," a futuristic mystery

This futuristic mystery doesn’t measure up

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes What might we reasonably expect of a novel set in interplanetary space several centuries in the future? Certainly, at a minimum, some plausible picture of technology more advanced than today's, right?. No alarm clocks, for example. Or fluorescent lights, mainframe...
Cover image of "Revelation," a novel about religious complications in the time of Henry VIII

Religious fanatics and other madmen in Tudor times

A deranged serial killer haunts the precincts of Tudor London in Revelation, the fourth entry in C. J. Sansom's series of Matthew Shardlake mysteries. And a fellow barrister at Lincoln's Inn who is Matthew's best friend is the first victim to come to light. Enraged, Matthew impulsively promises...
The Madonnas of Leningrad is about the Siege of Leningrad.

A novel about memory evokes the siege of Leningrad

Americans tend to think that the United States won World War II. Some even seem to believe we did so single-handedly. But while that may be substantially true in the case of the Pacific War against Imperial Japan, it was most assuredly not so in Europe. For one thing, the war there had been raging...
Cover image of "Burnout," a novel about a futuristic account of man against machine

A near-future tale of man against machine

From the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution, men have struggled against the forces of automation. In English history, the first widespread outbreak of rage in the contest known as man vs. machine was the Luddite Rebellion (1811-16). For Americans, the iconic manifestation of that conflict...
Cover image of "The White Man's Burden," one of the best books on Third World poverty.

Third World poverty and economic development: a reading list

The emergence of new nations out of a colonial past was one of the most significant developments of the 20th Century—if not the most important of all. Their uneven struggle to attain the comforts and possibilities of life to be found in Europe, North America, and Japan continues to loom large in...
Cover image of "In the Time of Five Pumpkins," a hopeful picture of Africa's future

A charming portrait of an African country that breaks the mold

The South African nation of Botswana attracts wildlife tourists and diamond-buyers but little other attention from the outside world. It's a big place, nearly as large as the state of Texas, but sparsely populated with only about 2.5 million inhabitants. That makes it the size of Greater Portland,...
Cover image of "Stardust," a novel about postwar Hollywood

Intrigue among German emigrés in postwar Hollywood

Ben Collier, born Reuben Kohler, is a German-American Jew raised in the film industry by his famous director father. He leaves Germany in the days immediately following the end of the Second World War in Europe to visit his brother Danny, who lies in a coma in a Hollywood hospital. There, he finds...
Cover image of "Hum,"

A low-key dystopian novel that’s deeply disturbing

Dystopian novels typically involve high-level drama and violence. People die. Usually lots of them. But dystopia doesn't have to fit that mold. Helen Phillips ably demonstrates that proposition in her low-key story about one family in a near-future America who become caught up in the gears of a...

My Most Popular Reviews

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Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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