The Latest

SCIENCE FICTION

MYSTERIES & THRILLERS

A clever whodunit author outdoes himself

A clever whodunit author outdoes himself

In A Deadly Episode, the sixth book in his Hawthorne and Horowitz series, Anthony Horowitz delivers a belated sequel to the novel that launched the series, The Word is Murder. And, true to form, he delivers a baffling story with a devilishly clever premise. Yes, Horowitz does...

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NONFICTION

How the Occupied nations helped win World War II

How the Occupied nations helped win World War II

Thousands of books memorialize the story of World War II in Europe. Every aspect of the conflict has received its due, from the fighting itself, to the deprivations on the home front, to the role of intelligence and the personalities of the civilian and military leadership on...

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Popular Fiction

Laughs in sci-fi? P. G. Wodehouse did humor better.

Laughs in sci-fi? P. G. Wodehouse did humor better.

The legendary English humorist Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (1881-1975), known to readers as P. G., wrote about 100 books in a career that spanned much of the 20th century. His output included 71 novels, 24 collections of short stories, 42 plays, three memoirs, and a lot...

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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 "Wake of War," a novel

Is a second civil war in America’s future?

Dystopian novels range across a spectrum from realism to absurdity. No one could regard the most famous of the lot as realistic depictions of any recognizable future. Brave New World, 1984, and The Handmaid's Tale are works of literature, taking poetic license to drive home the author's vision....
Cover image of "Code Name Edelweiss," a novel about Nazis in America

Spying against the Nazis in 1930s Hollywood

Few remember them today, but in the 1930s there were Nazis in America. Lots of them. And tens of millions of Americans supported them in the depths of the Depression. The Silver Shirts. German-American Bund. Friends of the New Germany. And Father Charles Coughlin's weekly pro-Nazi and antisemitic...
Clean Hands is a clver thriller.

A diabolically clever thriller about corporate espionage

In the early days of detective fiction, investigators such as Poe's Auguste Dupin and Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes solved cases through sheer deductive brilliance. Later came the tough guys of the hardboiled school of detective fiction (Hammett's Sam Spade, Chandler's Philip Marlow, more recently...
The Invention of Yesterday will help you understand human history.

Understanding human history as an extraterrestrial might view it

If you think history is a cold recitation of dates and the names of kings and battles, you owe it to yourself to check out Big History. And the best introduction I've found to that fascinating new field is Tamim Ansary's brilliant 50,000-year survey, The Invention of Yesterday. Unlike many of the...
Iraqi view: Nabeel's Song by Jo Tatchell

The Iraqi view of life under Saddam Hussein

The celebrated Iraqi poet Nabeel Yasin and his family were front-row witnesses to the brutality, the indignities, and the humiliations of life under Saddam Hussein for more than three decades. In this lovingly written family biography, Jo Tatchell, a British freelance journalist and friend of...
Cover image of "Two Nights in Lisbon,"

A compelling thriller full of surprises

Ariel Pryce awakens to a sunny day in Lisbon only to find her new husband, John Wright, missing. After hours waiting for him to turn up, it's clear something's amiss. There's no message, and no sign of him whatsoever. Fearing he's fallen victim to an accident or been kidnapped, she turns to the...
Cover image of "The Sassoons," z book about the famous family that grew wealthy trading opium

Trading opium, cotton, and textiles, they built a fortune

For a century, from the 1870s to the 1960s, their family name was one of the most recognizable in the world. They were wealthy beyond the limits of imagination, and they married into European royalty and other ultra wealthy families such as the Rothschilds. Their roots lay in ancient Babylon. For...
Googled by Ken Auletta

Ken Auletta takes us behind the scenes at an extraordinary company

Ken Auletta monitors the media for the New Yorker magazine, and his writing frequently brings new perspective our understanding of the changes that are upending the world's information sources at an alarming rate. "Googled" brings us face to face with several of the remarkable individuals who are...
Cover image of "The Envoy," a novel about British intelligence and the H-bomb

The CIA, the KGB, British intelligence and the H-bomb

It's 1956, and all hell is about to break out. The U.S. has been testing the first hydrogen bombs, and the USSR and the UK are both scrambling to produce their own. Soviet spies Burgess and Maclean have recently appeared in public in Moscow for the first time since defecting from England five...
Cover image of "Rough Country" by John Sandford, one of the excellent Virgil Flowers novels.

John Sandford’s excellent Virgil Flowers novels

Bestselling crime novelist John Sandford originally developed Virgil Flowers as a character in his long-running Prey series starring Lucas Davenport (another fascinating and entirely original Sandford character). The 12 excellent Virgil Flowers novels are a spinoff from the longer series. Writing...

My Most Popular Reviews

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Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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Mal Warwick

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