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SCIENCE FICTION

MYSTERIES & THRILLERS

NONFICTION

How Adolf Hitler raised the money to finance his rise

How Adolf Hitler raised the money to finance his rise

From its early days following World War I, what Hitler later renamed the Nazi Party had a powerful political sponsor behind the scenes: the Thule Society. Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw notes that the organization's "membership list ... reads like a Who's Who of early Nazi...

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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 "Secrets Typed in Blood," a 1940s noir novel

Pentecost and Parker are on the case

Think 1940s noir, and what comes to mind? Tough-guy private eyes and corrupt cops. Fistfights in dark alleys. Beautiful dames with murder in their eyes. But that's not what Stephen Spotswood has in store for you in his 21st-century take on the period. Because only in the mood they convey do the...

The truth about microfinance: microcredit doesn’t end poverty

Some microfinance is extremely beneficial to the poor, but it is not the miracle cure that its publicists would have you believe. Microfinance has been hijacked by profiteers, and we need to reclaim it for the poor. The problem is not with a few rogue operators, alas, but with systemic flaws that...
Cover image of "Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen," a nontraditional love story

A nontraditional love story in the Vorkosigan Saga

Surprise! Admiral Aral Vorkosigan was bisexual. Yes, the former Regent and Prime Minister to the young Emperor Gregor, Viceroy of Sergyar, the feared Count Vorkosigan, was bisexual. And the Admiral and his equally formidable wife of more than four decades, Cordelia Naismith, lived in a virtual...
How Fascism Works is about the "politics of us and them."

Donald Trump’s playbook revealed in a penetrating new book, “How Fascism Works”

Let's get real. What the news media and the pundits call populism these days is actually something more familiar to European historians. It's fascism. And it's high time for Americans to recognize that. Of course, this doesn't mean that the politics of the Trump Administration represent full-blown...
Cover image of "Live by Night," an action-packed novel

A thoughtful, action-packed crime story

Some years later, on a tugboat in the Gulf of Mexico, Joe Coughlin's feet were placed in a tub of cement. Twelve gunmen stood waiting until they got far enough out to sea to throw him overboard." Thus opens Dennis Lehane's action-packed novel, Live by Night. It is 1926, years before this...
Tomorrow's Kin is hard sci-fi about evolutionary biology.

Hard science fiction doesn’t get much better than this

In most first contact stories, human meets alien, and then something happens. Whether the aliens are evil or benign, the tale centers on whatever happens in their interaction. That's not the case in Tomorrow's Kin, the first volume in Nancy Kress's engrossing Yesterday's Kin Trilogy. The contact...
Cover image of "Got Your Attention" is a book about communication

Communication that gets the point across

A few very clever people can turn a simple truth into a career. Sam Horn is one of them. Walking the well-worn path trod by Dale Carnegie (How to Win Friends and Influence People), Horn -- who is a she, by the way -- has crafted a useful little handbook for anyone in the business of communication....
Cover image of "The Ways of the World" by Robert Goddard, a novel set in 1919 Paris

Robert Goddard’s superb novel of espionage set in 1919 Paris

James Maxted, known to friends as Max and to family as James, is the protagonist of this engrossing historical novel and several planned sequels. Max is a former ace in World War I in what was later called the Royal Air Force. Shot down behind German lines midway through the war, he spent two...
A Prisoner in Malta is a historical mystery novel.

A delightful historical mystery novel starring Christopher Marlowe

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes If you're looking for a swashbuckling adventure story, check out A Prisoner in Malta by Phillip DePoy. In this fast-moving historical mystery novel featuring Christopher Marlowe, the 19-year-old poet and playwright swashes buckles with the best of them. Naturally,...
The Others

UFOs deserve a far better explanation than this one

And the prize for the nuttiest and most far-fetched explanation for alien abductions by UFOs goes to . . . Jeremy Robinson, for The Others. In a story that involves a rural Arizona sheriff, an Uber driver who isn't an Uber driver, squads of mercenaries, black helicopters, human traffickers, a...

My Most Popular Reviews

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Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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Mal Warwick

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