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

Travis McGee stumbles into a massive financial fraud

Travis McGee stumbles into a massive financial fraud

He calls himself a beach bum. Travis McGee lives on a houseboat in Fort Lauderdale and only works when he's running out of money. Then he becomes a "salvage consultant," helping someone who's been robbed blind. He'll steal back the money or valuables—for half the take. But this...

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NONFICTION

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 One Device," a book about the world's most profitable product

The iPhone: the world’s most profitable product?

Other Silicon Valley observers have written about the development of the iPhone—but it's unlikely that anyone else has delved as deeply into the subject as Brian Merchant . . . or will ever do so in the future, for that matter. Merchant's brilliant new book, The One Device: The Secret History of...

Race relations in colonial Africa through the eyes of a Swedish novelist

Among the countless books and plays written by the masterful Swedish writer Henning Mankell are nine novels and one collection of five short stories about the life and work of a troubled police detective named Kurt Wallander in the town of Ystad, Sweden. The Wallander series, which has been...

In Ishmael Beah’s novel, hope lives on in the depths of hell

If you think you’ve experienced the worst that a human being can bear, Ishmael Beah will show you how very wrong you are. Then, remarkably, he’ll share his hope for better and leave you feeling restored. In Radiance of Tomorrow -- just in case you didn't get it, radiance = hope...
Cover image of "Solar Storm: Moon Base Delta," the first book in a series set on the moon

A solar storm imperils life on Earth, in space, and on the moon

Back in 1859, a coronal mass ejection from the sun showered Earth with a torrent of highly charged subatomic particles. The widespread use of electricity was decades in the future, so the impact of what came to be called the Carrington Event was limited. But scientists—and some science fiction...
Cover image of "Cuba: An American History,"

American history through a Cuban lens

What most of us in the US know about Cuba revolves around three events. The Spanish-American War ("Remember the Maine" and Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders). The Bay of Pigs Invasion. And the Cuban Missile Crisis. But our two countries have a much longer and richer history than that. In fact, as...
Cover image of "Dead Wake," a book about the Lusitania

When a U-boat sank the Lusitania and changed history

Think "ocean liner sinking," and what comes to mind? The Titanic, of course. Yet the destruction of the Lusitania barely three years later, with the loss of nearly as many lives (almost 1,200), was far more consequential. When the German U-boat designated U-20 torpedoed the luxury liner just south...
Blackout

Historians study World War II in person

History is often an unreliable guide to the past. Documents go missing or remain classified. Records may be erroneous—or even have been written to be misleading. And historians inevitably build their own prejudices and expectations into their interpretation of past events. How extraordinary it...
Cover image of "The Edge of Anarchy,"

The American labor movement in the Gilded Age

Today's widening gap between rich and poor—the billionaires versus the rest of us—is often compared to that in the Gilded Age. Then, the parties involved were the Robber Barons at society's pinnacle and the working men and women whose labor generated the obscene wealth the rich displayed with such...
Cover image of "Selection Day," a disappointing book by an Indian novelist

An Indian novelist celebrates cricket

Aravind Adiga entered the literary world with a splash in 2008 when he won the Booker Prize for his debut novel, The White Tiger. Although I frequently find Booker Prize-winning books to be unreadable, I picked up The White Tiger, anyway. My interest in India trumped my hesitation about the...
lessons for living: Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

From the ashes of the Holocaust, a gift of lessons for living

A review of Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor E. Frankl. @@@@ (4 out of 5). The lessons learned by a leading psychiatrist from his experience as a prisoner in four Nazi concentration camps

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Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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Mal Warwick

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