If you’re looking for insightful writing about dirty politics, the novels of Ross Thomas have no peer. In The Porkchoppers, Thomas portrays the behind-the-scenes reality of a high-stakes labor union election, and it ain’t pretty. The picture is likely to be exaggerated through the lens...
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Call it selective memory: we tend to forget that the survival of our democratic system was by no means assured on March 4, 1933, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was sworn in as president. With the country paralyzed by twenty-five percent unemployment, shuttered factories, insolvent banks, and...
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How far can a writer push the bounds of credibility in a thriller? If we look at the work of authors whose protagonists resemble superheroes more than real people — Ian Fleming, for example, or Daniel Silva, to cite a contemporary example — we realize that we’ve left the realm of...
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In Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies, Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit trace the intellectual history of “the dehumanizing picture of the West painted by its enemies.” In other words, they try to help us understand why so many people in the world hate Western values....
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Ever since the publication of her first novel in the Grant County series, Blindsighted, Karin Slaughter has been selling thrillers by the millions. A Faint Cold Fear, the third of six books in the series, continues the saga of pediatrician and pathologist Dr. Sara Linton; her off-again, on-again...
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Mysteries & Thrillers Tuesday includes my latest mystery and thriller book review,
with links to other science fiction content.
Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review,
with links to other nonfiction content.
The Weekly 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.
Mysteries & Thrillers Tuesday includes my latest mystery and thriller book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review, with links to other nonfiction content.
The Weekly 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.