The Latest

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

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 "Davos Man," one of he books about billionaires reviewed here

Good books about billionaires

What Senator Bernie Sanders calls the “billionaire class” has had a profound impact on American society—and, indeed, on the world at large. Still, I was surprised to learn that so many of the books I’ve reviewed involve billionaires playing instrumental roles. Yes, they've built huge and important...
Cover image of "Rogue Heroes," the original special forces

The story of the original special forces

If you find the history of World War II fascinating, you're likely to feel that Rogue Heroes is endlessly so. In this eminently readable book, British historian Ben MacIntyre relates the story of the Special Air Service, the unit that set the pattern for special forces around the world. From its...
Cover image of "The Pentagon's Brain" by Annie Jacobsen, a book about top-secret military research

The mind-boggling story of America’s top-secret military research

If you're familiar with the history of the computer industry, you're no doubt aware that the Internet was conceived and developed by a U.S. Government agency called DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). That's the arm of the Pentagon responsible for top-secret military research....
Noumenon is a great example of visionary science fiction.

A visionary science fiction novel with hard science at its core

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes At its best, science fiction stretches the mind to its limits and beyond. Classic works such as Olaf Stapledon's Starmaker and Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy roam throughout the universe, spanning millions or even billions of years and offering a glimpse of...
Cover image of "The Vig," the first of the Dismas Hardy series

A great start to John Lescroart’s Dismas Hardy series

Dismas Hardy's resumé is a little difficult to understand: former Marine (combat in Vietnam), former San Francisco cop, former Assistant DA, now one-quarter owner of the Shamrock and full-time bartender there. The explanation is simple, though. The events that induced him to leave a promising...
Cover image of "The Warsaw Uprising,"

The Warsaw Uprising of 1944

No country in the world suffered greater devastation in World War II than Poland, not even the Soviet Union, where as many as twenty-seven million people died. Poland's six million dead represented an even higher proportion of the pre-war population—about one in five. And Poland's cities lay in...
Extra Life

Why are people living so much longer these days?

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes Ask just about anyone why we live so much longer these days, and the answer will come quickly. It's the doctors, right? Continuing advances in medical science surely account for those centenarians who keep cropping up on obituary pages. After all, human life...
Cover image of "The Money Makers," a book about the gold standard

FDR, the gold standard, and the Great Depression

Call it selective memory: we tend to forget that the survival of our democratic system was by no means assured on March 4, 1933, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was sworn in as president. With the country paralyzed by twenty-five percent unemployment, shuttered factories, insolvent banks, and...
Cover image of "Poverty, by America," which explains how to end poverty in America

How to end poverty in America

One of the ugliest aspects of life in America today is the appalling level of poverty—and the failure of our government to do anything meaningful about it. As sociologist Matthew Desmond makes clear in Poverty, By America, a single action by Congress and the President could easily generate the...
Cover image of "The Keeper of Lost Causes" by Jussi Adler-Olsen, one of the Department Q thrillers

Jussi-Adler Olsen’s captivating Department Q thrillers

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes Since 2007, Danish thriller writer Jussi Adler-Olsen has written seven bestselling novels in his ongoing series about Department Q at police headquarters in Copenhagen. All the principal characters in their own ways are misfits. Detective Carl Mørck has...

My Most Popular Reviews

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Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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Mal Warwick

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