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 "The Avatar," a novel that portrays a possible future among the stars

Alien life abounds in our starfaring future

This is a big book as science fiction novels go, and it doesn't fit it in any one of the standard categories. First Contact novel? Check. Space opera? Yes. Adventure story? That, too. Travelogue? Even that. Political novel? Oh, yes. But at its hard SF heart, Poul Anderson's The Avatar is a...

Another suspenseful crime novel from Jo Nesbo

Spoiler alert: this is not one of the detective novels in Jo Nesbo's celebrated Harry Hole series. But don't beat yourself up. I was fooled, too. In any case, it's a truly suspenseful crime novel. Inspector Hole is, of course, the intuitive alcoholic genius who routinely shows up all his...
Cover image of "The Courier," a novel grounded in the Nazi occupation of Norway

Murder and intrigue in Nazi-occupied Norway

Oslo, August 2015. An old woman named Turid chances across an entry in an auctioneer's booklet. It's a bracelet with a minimum bid of one hundred thousand kroner, or about $10,000 today. "It is forty-eight years since she last saw her bracelet." So Turid digs out the old papers and presents them...
Cover image of "The Travelers" by Chris Pavone, a clever spy story

A clever spy story that will keep you guessing

In his third novel, The Travelers, Chris Pavone weaves a tale so baffling that you're likely to be shocked again and again as the truth at the heart of the story gradually floats to the surface. Once again, as in his previous books, Pavone's subject matter is espionage. The scene shifts rapidly...
The Forever War is a classic science fiction war novel.

This classic science fiction war novel won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards

Joe Haldeman's classic science fiction war novel, The Forever War, appears on most lists of the all-time most popular stories in the field. The book won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novel. When it was published in 1974, the Vietnam War was winding down. Haldeman had fought in the war...
Among the Mad by Jacqueline Winspear, one of the Maisie Dobbs novels

The Maisie Dobbs novels from Jacqueline Winspear

British author Jacqueline Winspear has written 17 novels to date in the award-winning Maisie Dobbs series since 2003. The novels span the years from the turn of the 20th century to World War II. The early entries in the series dwell on the aftermath of World War I, emphasizing what was then...
Cover image of "Unit X," a book about reforming the Pentagon

Bucking the Pentagon’s resistance to change

We Americans have long believed that the US military is the most advanced and most capable in the world. But in some respects that's no longer the case. For example, China's new, nuclear-armed hypersonic missiles could destroy in an instant the USS Gerald R. Ford, the US Navy's most sophisticated...
The Future of Humanity is one of 20 good nonfiction books about the future.

Good nonfiction books about the future

Will the future be dystopian? Can the human race even survive climate change and the ongoing mass extinction? Or does technology promise a far better and more hopeful future? The two dozen nonfiction books listed here offer a wide range of perspectives on these questions. They explore the impact...

Michael Lewis: “The stock market is rigged!”

Bestselling Berkeley author Michael Lewis has been spending a lot of time in the East lately. After researching and writing his blockbuster fifteenth nonfiction book, Flash Boys, currently the country's #1 best seller, he's now juggling interviews and appearances triggered by the fallout. I can't...
Cover image of "A Country of Vast Designs," a biography of the man who started the Mexican-American War

The President who launched the Mexican-American War

When we conjure up images of our greatest American Presidents, a handful of names invariably comes up: George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, of course; Thomas Jefferson and Franklin D. Roosevelt, too; perhaps Theodore Roosevelt as well. Today many of us would add one or more from among those who...

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