A review of A Spy by Nature, by Charles Cumming. @@@@ (4 out of 5). A Spy by Nature, Charles Cumming’s first novel, is the semi-autobiographical precursor several subsequent espionage stories that have caught the attention of reviewers and the reading public alike. A Spy by Nature is an entirely worthy antecedent of Cumming’s later, more fully realized spy stories.

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes If you're looking for a swashbuckling adventure story, check out A Prisoner in Malta by Phillip DePoy. In this fast-moving historical mystery novel featuring Christopher Marlowe, the 19-year-old poet and playwright swashes buckles with the best of them. Naturally,...

Octavia Butler was the author of three cycles of science fiction novels—two Parable books, the Xenogenesis trilogy, and five books in the Patternmaster series—as well as two standalone novels. She is also credited with seven graphic novels (including Black Panther) produced in collaboration with...

He founded Stanford University to honor his fifteen-year-old son who died of typhoid fever — and left the university near bankruptcy when he died, without an endowment. He was elected as California's eighth Governor when his business partners effectively bought the job for him after he had lost...

For decades, as climate change has wreaked havoc ever more visibly, scientists and engineers have advanced a plethora of technological fixes. Not just switching to renewables such as solar and wind power but direct interventions into the climate through geoengineering. Examples range from the...

There's something strange about Norwegian detective Odd Singsaker. It's not his name, which is common enough in Norway, but the aftermath of the neurosurgery that removed a golf-ball-sized tumor from his brain a year ago. When he returns to work for the first day after his convalescence, he finds...

A review of The Confession, by Olen Steinhauer. @@@@ (4 out of 5). Tthe second in a cycle of five novels by Olen Steinhauer about the troubled policemen of one district in the capital of a fictional Eastern European country spanning the years 1948-1989. This book is set in the fateful year of 1956, when Hungary rose up against Russian occupation.

Assume that the people who call the shots at MI6 and the CIA had grown so frustrated by the 1980s at the restrictions imposed on them by politicians that they decided to work around them. The two agencies then came together in a "special alliance" to create an off-the-books Anglo American spy...

Hollywood, June 1944. Europe is still at war, with England about to fall to Hitler's legions. In the United States, FDR readies a run for a third term as the fascist Liberty League gains ground across the land. Everywhere, people are flocking to the theaters to take in the newest "feelies,"...

In prose of unusual grace, Timothy Egan tells the tale of The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero. His subject is Thomas Francis Meagher (pronounced "Mar"). At the age of forty-three, he vanished mysteriously, a victim of drowning in the Missouri River in Montana...