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 "Wolves Eat Dogs," a book about Chernobyl

Martin Cruz Smith addresses what really happened at Chernobyl

Over the years, I made two trips to the Soviet Union. The first time was in 1965, in the course of a four-month knockabout through the USSR, Eastern and Central Europe, and Scandinavia before my Peace Corps service started. (That was the trip during which I was threatened by submachinegun-toting...
Cover image of "The Coyotes of Carthage,"

An eye-opening novel grounded in the real world of small-town politics

Andre Ross is a high-priced field operative for one of DC's top political consulting firms. But he's on the outs with his boss and mentor, Fiona Fitzpatrick, the firm's sole female founding partner. Andre is "a thirty-five-year-old black man with a criminal record, four felonies the court long ago...
Fata Morgana is full of clever plot twists.

Clever plot twists in a time travel tale

Science fiction authors love time travel stories, because it affords them abundant opportunities to build plots full of clever plot twists and turns. Sometimes the surprises are really anything but shocking. But that's not the case with the ingenious tale Steven R. Boyett and Ken Mitchroney have...
Cover image of "The Plantagenets," a book about England's longest-ruling dynasty

The many great stories of Britain’s bloodiest dynasty

They ruled England (and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland from time to time) for more than three centuries. By my count, there were sixteen of them in all. They held sway, sometimes shakily, from 1154 to 1485. French in origin—their family's roots lay in the County of Anjou—the Plantagenet kings...
J. K. Rowling's one-legged detective stars in Lethal White.

J. K. Rowling’s one-legged detective is on the prowl again

J. K. Rowling is off to a roaring start in a second career as a detective novelist with the fourth entry in the Cormoran Strike series. As is well known, the author of the Harry Potter books writes these mysteries under the name Robert Galbraith (which defeats the purpose of a pseudonym). Rowling...
New York Times thriller - Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

A bestselling New York Times thriller that’s worth all the fuss

A review of Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn. @@@@@ (5 out of 5). This is the story of Amy Elliott Dunne and Nick Dunne, the perfect couple in the ideal marriage. Then one day Amy goes missing, and it slowly begins to dawn on you that one (or both) of the two is a sociopath.

Tau Zero is a great example of classic hard science fiction.

In this great example of classic hard science fiction, humankind reaches the stars

Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, Ben Bova, and Stanislaw Lew produced some of the best classic hard science fiction. But every list of classic novels in that sub-genre invariably includes Poul Anderson's wild ride into interstellar space, Tau Zero. Estimated reading time: 4 minutes A great...
Cover image of "Entropy,"

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 in the Amazon...

Why do some novels win literary awards?

Let's see if we can figure out why this paper-thin work of fiction won wide recognition and a literary award for its author. Snow Hunters introduces . . . let's count them: eight characters: Yohan, a North Korean soldier captured by UN forces late in the Korean war; Peng, his friend from...
Cover image of "The Art of War," an alien invasion novel

China and the US are on the brink of war. Or are they?

Most portrayals on film or in novels of an alien invasion are along the lines of the Will Smith blockbuster Independence Day or H. G. Wells' 1898 science fiction classic, The War of the Worlds. There are a lot of explosions, and millions die. So, it may come as a pleasant surprise if you pick up a...

My Most Popular Reviews

Weekly Reviews Delivered to You!

Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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Mal Warwick

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