The Latest

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

Bombay’s sole female lawyer investigates early Bollywood

Bombay’s sole female lawyer investigates early Bollywood

The American motion picture industry, which we know as "Hollywood," began in the early 1910s when filmmakers migrated to California. By 1915, they had established a global cinema hub. But filmmaking grew early in India, too. The first Hndi-language feature film produced there,...

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NONFICTION

Where do all those emerging diseases come from?

Where do all those emerging diseases come from?

AIDS, Ebola, Marburg, SARS, H5N1—every one of the world's scariest diseases is a "zoonosis." That's a virus harbored by animals and transmitted to humans, often by other animals, in a complex minuet that often stretches out into decades. And these are the emerging diseases...

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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 "Underground Airlines,"

What if the American Civil War never happened?

Early in 1861, a pro-slavery fanatic assassinates President-Elect Abraham Lincoln on a visit to Indianapolis. This event sets the scene for Ben H. Winters' tension-filled alternate history thriller, Underground Airlines. Lacking Lincoln's leadership, the American government stumbles into an uneasy...
Cover image of "Water to the Angels," a book about the Los Angeles Aqueduct

How the desert town of Los Angeles became the city it is today

It's hard to imagine a more timely book than Water to the Angels, a book about the Los Angeles Aqueduct that appears in the midst of a drought in California of historic proportions. Framed as a biography of William Mulholland, who built and managed the Los Angeles Aqueduct that supplied L.A....
Cover image of "Upgrade," a novel like a comic book story

On the road to transhumanism

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes Let's say you want to write a superhero story without superheroes. What do you do? Simple. You endow ordinary people with superhuman intelligence and enhanced senses by implanting something in their brains. Chips, maybe. Or nanocytes. Then suddenly you've got...
Cover image of "Phantom," a Harry Hole novel

Another brilliant Harry Hole tale from Jo Nesbo

Here's what's in store for you if you read Phantom or any other of Jo Nesbo's engrossing Harry Hole novels: maddening suspense; several confusing plots and subplots that collide and intersect with abandon and only make sense as the end approaches; an alcoholic, self-hating detective (Harry) who is...
Cover image of "Democracy Awakening," a history of today's Republican Party

How the Republican Party came to be what it is today

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes As Heather Cox Richardson notes in the foreword to her new book, Democracy Awakening, "Democracies die more often through the ballot box than at gunpoint." And since that prospect faces us later this year, the story she tells of the decades-long campaign by...
Cover image of "The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind," a book about hope for Africa

A young man from Malawi points the way to hope for Africa

A debate has been raging for years within that rarefied global community that earns its keep from the business of what we Americans call “foreign aid.” The term is faintly pejorative. (Those who favor international engagement typically call the field “official development assistance.”) And much of...
Cover image of "Top Secret America" by Dana Priest, one of the eye-opening books about terrorism reviewed here.

20 eye-opening books about terrorism

I haven’t made a special study of international terrorism. Still, I’ve read 20 eye-opening books in recent years that cast light on the subject. Eight are nonfiction, twelve fiction. I’m listing them below, alphabetized by the authors’ last names within each category. Each author’s surname is...
Finlay Donovan Is Killing It

Funny mystery about a suburban contract killer

Even if you're not a mother, this novel is likely to grab you from the outset. "It's a widely known fact that most moms are ready to kill someone by eight thirty A.M. on any given morning." So muses Finlay Donovan—divorced mother of two, hack author of murder mysteries, and, as you'll soon see,...
Cover image of "A Rage for Order," a book about the Arab Spring

A postmortem for the Arab Spring

Historians are fond of advancing the notion that no major event in human affairs can be fully understood until many years later, when the major actors have passed from the scene and long-suppressed archival records finally come to light. Journalists sometimes dispute this contention, citing their...
Cover image of "Faces of America," which includes sketchy biographies supplemented by genealogical and genetic research

Untangling America’s diverse past through genetics

A decade and a half ago Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. co-produced and narrated a four-episode series on PBS, reporting on the findings he and his team came up with from studying the family history and genetic profile of 12 famous and near-famous Americans. Faces of America aired in...

My Most Popular Reviews

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Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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Mal Warwick

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