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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 "Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World," the true story of Genghis Khan

Genghis Khan was not the crazed killer history portrays.

We study history to learn where we've come from and how we got to where we are. But we're dependent on the politicians, scholars, and commentators to deliver an active account of the past. And few world leaders in our planet's history have been more dramatically caricatured than the Mongolian...
Cover image of "American War," a novel about a future American Civil War

A chilling tale, lucidly told, of a Second American Civil War

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes In American War by Omar El Akkad, the Second American Civil War erupts in 2074 when Sara T. ("Sarat") Chestnut is six years old. Four states in the Deep South have seceded in response to federal legislation banning the use of fossil fuels—and a Southern "homicide...
The Secret Life of Groceries

An investigative journalist tackles the American supermarket

If you sometimes wonder, as I do, what good civilization has done for us, consider food. For most of the 300,000 years during which homo sapiens has walked on Earth, we devoted nearly all our waking hours to finding and securing food. That began to change about 10,000 years ago with the advent of...
Cover image of "After Lives,"

A Nobel Prizewinner probes his country’s history

For three decades, the nation now known as Tanzania was a German colony. In 1891, the country and adjoining territory (including Rwanda and Burundi) became Deutsch-Ostafrika. But when Germany lost World War I, the British, Belgians, and Portuguese took over. The lion's share was first a mandate...
Cover image of "Nexus" by Ramez Naam, a novel about the post-human future

The post-human future explored in an outstanding SF novel

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes Nearly sixty years ago, a psychologist and computer scientist named J. C. R. Licklider published a landmark paper under the title "Man-Computer Symbiosis." He is best known today as the Pentagon official who funded the predecessor to the Internet, the ARPANET. But...
A Bitter Feast features a large cast of characters.

Deborah Crombie shows her chops with a large cast of characters

If you've ever wondered what it takes to write a murder mystery, imagine trying to create something like A Bitter Feast, Deborah Crombie's eighteenth entry in the Gemma James and Duncan Kincaid series. Forget the plot. Just consider the large cast of characters. An epically large cast of...
State of Terror

The new Hillary Clinton novel is a page-turner

Secretary of State Ellen Adams loathes her boss, and the feeling is mutual. She's convinced he had named her to the post only to find a way to destroy her reputation. And when he torpedoes a vital diplomatic mission to Korea that is intensely embarrassing to her, she knows she's right. The...
Cover image of "Gertrude Bell,"

She was more famous than Lawrence of Arabia, and more important

Gertrude Bell (1868-1926) was one of the most remarkable women of the 20th century. Or of any century, for that matter. Her life spanned the Victorian and Edwardian eras, the First World War, and its aftermath. She distinguished herself as an explorer, mountaineer, travel writer, political...
Cover image of "The Burning Room," one of 5 top Los Angeles mysteries and thrillers.

Top Los Angeles mysteries and thrillers

Every major city has been the setting for numerous mysteries and thrillers. Amazon lists more than 10,000 for New York, 8,000 for Chicago, and 3,000 for Los Angeles. But there’s nothing mysterious about this. Crime is more visible, if not more common on a per capita basis, in cities. And the...
Cover image of "Agents of Influence,"a book that details British interference in American politics in WWII.

British interference in American politics in WWII

In The Splendid and the Vile, a moving and revealing account of Winston Churchill's leadership during the Blitz, Erik Larson makes much of the Prime Minister's dogged campaign to persuade Franklin Roosevelt to drag the United States into the defense of Britain. Historians concur that Churchill's...

My Most Popular Reviews

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Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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Mal Warwick

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