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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 "Rachel to the Rescue," a satirical take on Donald Trump

A wacky satirical take on Donald Trump

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes Meet Rachel Klein. It's her last day on the job in the White House. She works in the fictional White House Office of Presidential Correspondence. There, Rachel uses Scotch tape to reconstruct the documents President Donald Trump rips up and tosses into the trash...
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...
Collusion by Stuart Neville is about Belfast after the Good Friday Agreement.

Uncovering the sources of violence in Belfast after the Good Friday Agreement

After the Good Friday Agreement in 1999 among the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, and the political parties of Northern Ireland, the people of Belfast experienced a period of uneasy peace. Following centuries of inter-communal warfare, including terrorist bombings and targeted...
Cover image of "River Spirit," a novel about an anti-colonial revolt in 19th-century Africa

A slave’s story set in colonial Sudan

Nearly a century and a half ago, the northern African nation of Sudan was in turmoil. Like much of the Middle East and North Africa, the people of the country were restive under the increasingly weak rule of the Ottoman Empire. The Khedive of Egypt, who administered Sudan for the sultan in...
rural Kansas: Dark Places by Gillian Flynn

A roller-coaster ride through the depths of depravity in rural Kansas

A review of Dark Places, by Gillian Flynn. @@@@ (4 out of 5). Unraveling the truth behind a 1985 mass murder known as the Satanic Ritual Murders of Kinakee, a small, depressed farm town in Kansas, through the eyes of a survivor and of her brother, who is serving a life term for committing the murders.

A Burning is about the consequences of Hindu nationalism.

Terrorism, corruption, and Hindu nationalism in India today

Few of us who live in comfortable circumstances—or just about anyone else, in fact—in the Global North can fully appreciate the impact of poverty and official corruption that runs rampant in so many of the nations clustered in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This is the reality the debut novelist...

Why the Great Recession happened — and the Great Depression before it

Today, many Americans puzzle over why the Great Recession happened. Amazon lists more than 1,000 books on the subject. But readers today might benefit from taking a longer view. Because, as Frederick Lewis Allen told the tale in The Lords of Creation nearly ninety years ago, the conditions that...
Cover image of "Operation Heartbreak,"

Fact vs fiction in the story of an outrageous WWII deception

When we think of Allied operations in World War II designed to fool the Nazis, most of us think "Normandy." After all, the elaborate efforts to conceal the time and place of D-Day famously included a fake army and hundreds of inflatable tanks, airplanes, and artillery pieces. Not to mention all...
Cover image of "The Matchmaker," a novel about a notorious East German spymaster

A dangerous spy game in Berlin before the fall of the Wall

Over the past half-dozen years, Paul Vidich has emerged as a major new voice in the literature of espionage. He writes historical fiction, with each of the five books he has published to date solidly grounded in verifiable facts. A mole hunt in the CIA during the paranoid years of the Red Scare. A...
Cover image of "Project HALFSHEEP" by Susan Hasler, a novel about the CIA, LSD, and a 3-foot alien

The CIA, LSD, and a drug-addled alien from the planet Utorb

In 1953, the fledgling CIA under Director Allen Dulles launched a mind-control program called MKUltra. The project was an experiment on human subjects with drugs that included LSD years before Timothy Leary turned on and dropped out. Caught up in the anti-Communist hysteria of the time, the CIA...

My Most Popular Reviews

Weekly Reviews Delivered to You!

Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

Weekly book reviews to match your taste!

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Mal Warwick

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