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SCIENCE FICTION

MYSTERIES & THRILLERS

A hilarious romp through the byways of small-town crime

A hilarious romp through the byways of small-town crime

To be clear at the outset, you should not expect a realistic picture of small-town crime when you read Justin Halpern's comic masterpiece, Get Lost. What you'll get instead is a fiendishly clever story that somehow involves a missing woman, corrupt almond farmers, a Big Box...

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NONFICTION

The outsize influence of gold in history

The outsize influence of gold in history

Just so you know at the outset, the author of The Secret History of Gold comes to the task with a pronounced set of biases. He is a gold bug who believes that shiny, indestructible element is the ultimate store of value. He believes governments in the past erred by taking...

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Popular Fiction

American history, laughing all the way

American history, laughing all the way

Scoot yourself over, Huckleberry Finn! Make room! Here comes Henry Shackleford, aka Henrietta, aka Little Onion, with a tall tale ripped and twisted out of the pages of history that's like to set your britches afire. Yes, here's The Good Lord Bird, courtesy of James McBride, a...

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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 a biography of Karl Marx

An insightful new biography of Karl Marx

In a new biography of Karl Marx, the historian Jonathan Sperber set out to explain his subject in the context of nineteenth-century circumstances and attitudes. "Marx was not our contemporary," he writes, "[but] more a figure of the past than a prophet of the present." He concludes that the way we...
The Woman in Cabin 10 is a #1 bestselling psychological thriller.

A #1 bestselling psychological thriller that’s suspenseful to the end

What can explain the success of a #1 bestselling psychological thriller? In The Woman in Cabin 10, British author Ruth Ware demonstrates one likely explanation with consummate skill. She combines elements of a whodunnit, a locked-room mystery, and an unreliable narrator without falling victim...
In Over the Edge, the author demonstrates his psychological expertise.

Psychological expertise enlivens this crime thriller involving gifted children

Alex Delaware had left behind his practice as a child psychologist three years earlier. But when he receives a call in the middle of the night about a former patient, he doesn't hesitate to rush out to the psychiatric hospital where the young man was living. Except that Jamey Cadmus is no longer...
Walking to Aldebaran reads like a fever dream.

A science fiction novel that reads like a fever dream

Have you ever experienced a fever dream? One of those utterly vivid nightmares that erupt as your body's temperature spikes well over 100? If so, you might have a sense how Adrian Tchaikovsky could have come to write his novella, Walking to Aldebaran. There seems no other explanation that makes...
Cover image of "The Swiss Spy," a novel about spies in Switzerland

World War II spies in Switzerland

The role that Switzerland played in World War II is reasonably well known. Swiss banks laundered the equivalent of billions of dollars in funds seized from Jews and others by the Nazi regime in neighboring Germany. Because the country was officially neutral in the war, Zurich, Geneva, Bern, and...
Cover image of "Behind the Beautiful Forevers," a book about poverty in India

A searing look at poverty in India that reads like a novel

A review of Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, by Katherine Boo. @@@@@ (5 out of 5). Boo focuses on the experiences of two slum families, one consisting of 11 Muslim immigrants from India’s north who have built a business as garbage-brokers, the other family whose matriarch is affiliated with Shiv Sena, one of the most extreme and violent anti-Muslim political parties in India.

Cover image of "Daemon," one of the best techno-thrillers

The best techno-thrillers

Here you’ll find my candidates for the ten best among the more than three dozen techno-thrillers I’ve read and reviewed. Of course, you might ask what qualifies a novel to be called a techno-thriller. Definitions seem to vary. But mine is that it’s a story in which technology is at the root of...
Cover image of "The Korean War,"

The lessons we forgot from the Korean War—or never understood

Three-quarters of a century ago, the United States embarked on a war on the other side of the globe that almost never enters the consciousness of living Americans today. President Harry Truman's decision to undertake this "police action," as he termed it. proved to be a strategic decision of...
Cover image of "The Relic Master," one of the satirical novels Christopher Buckley writes

Christopher Buckley writes satirical novels that are very, very funny

It's no accident that Christopher Buckley writes such funny satirical novels. He is, pure and simple, a very funny man. I know this not just because I've read his books, which generally "kept me in stitches" (whatever that means), but also because I actually spent much of an evening with him not...
Cover image of "The Anatomy of Courage," a new alien invasion story

An inventive new take on the alien invasion story

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes Christopher Walters is a trauma surgeon in a place where life itself is traumatic. He carries the nominal rank of captain in the United States Army in southern Siberia. There, the Americans are attempting to hold firm on the Western Front in a war with the Novos,...

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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