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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 "The Trials of Harry S. Truman,"

A revealing new biography of Harry Truman

Joe Biden is the 46th in the line of US Presidents who have served since 1789. Every list of the greatest among them invariably includes George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and (usually) Franklin D. Roosevelt. There is no consensus among historians about the men who fall into the second tier. But...
Cover image of "Real Tigers" by Mick Herron, a novel about British spooks

Slough House spooks are on the loose again

They're all spooks. But Marcus is a gambling addict. Shirley's a cokehead ("It was a weekend thing with her, strictly Thursday to Tuesday"). Catherine is a recovering alcoholic, Louisa a sex addict, Roddy a hacker with a toxic personality. And River screwed up a large-scale training mission so...
Cover image of "Seven Brief Lessons on Physics," a book by an Italian physicist

Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli explains physics for the faint of heart

Back in the day, when I was young and setting out on a pre-med course at the University of Michigan, I gravitated toward the sciences. I was even pretty good at the stuff, if the grades I received were any indication. In fact, very good. I routinely received the top grade in a huge freshman...
Cover image of "The Promise," a South African saga

A South African saga spanning four decades

As Rachel Swart lies dying in 1986 after a long bout with cancer, she coaxes a promise from her husband, Manie. He agrees to deed to their long-suffering Black house servant, Salome, the house she's been living in all her life. Their younger daughter, Amor, overhears the exchange and presses her...
Red Chameleon

A Russian police procedural set in the Soviet Union

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes Chief Inspector Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov is out of favor. He had tried to blackmail a senior KGB official in hopes of obtaining exit visas for himself and his Jewish wife. Given widespread antisemitism, they hoped to emigrate to the United States. At the time,...
The Middleman is the story of a Second American Revolution.

A spy novelist foresees a Second American Revolution in a curious new novel

Olen Steinhauer has gained a reputation as one of the most compelling authors of espionage fiction writing today. He is best known for the Milo Weaver Trilogy (The Tourist, The Nearest Exit, An American Spy) and the five-book Yalta Boulevard Cycle in addition to three standalone novels. All these...
Cover image of "The Windfall," a novel about class envy

Sudden wealth, arranged marriages, and class envy in India today

In The Windfall, the debut novel from Indian writer and actress Diksha Basu, a struggling middle-aged, middle-class Delhi family strikes it rich and moves across town to a wealthy neighborhood in the suburb of Gurgaon. Anil Jha had strained for years to build an online business, earning just...
Cover image of "A Murder by Any Name,"

A lady-in-waiting’s murder threatens Queen Elizabeth I

She was just 16 years old, the youngest and newest of the Queen's ladies-in-waiting. And when her body turns up in the chapel, posed as though martyred, wild rumors begin flying about "the Jews." The queen worries that if the murder goes unsolved, insurrection might not be far off. To get to the...
The Girl Who Lived Twice is the new Lisbeth Salander novel.

The new Lisbeth Salander novel involves Russia, Nepal, Sweden, and more

Here's a novel that brings together the Swedish Minister of Defense, a doomed ascent of Mount Everest, Russian mobsters and the GRU, and a paranoid schizophrenic Sherpa guide, with Stieg Larsson's mismatched couple, Mikael Blomqvist and Lisbeth Salander. And she, Lisbeth, is still called a girl...
Cover image of "Avenue of Spies," a book about Occupied Europe

A revealing account of life under the Nazis in occupied Europe

If it's true that "God is in the details," wouldn't it stand to reason that history can best be understood through the stories of the individual people who experienced it? It often seems that way, doesn't it? Certainly, the reality of life in times past is far easier to get our arms...

My Most Popular Reviews

Weekly Reviews Delivered to You!

Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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Mal Warwick

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…includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.

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