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...
Read More
When years ago I read The Poisonwood Bible, I was flummoxed by its power and beauty. It was clear to me that Barbara Kingsolver possessed a fierce talent not just as a storyteller but also as a wordsmith and a reporter. Her vivid prose brought into high relief the tragic reality of life in...
Read More
Shortly after the 19th century turned into the 20th, a medical sleuth named George Soper, whom we would today call an epidemiologist, identified a young Irish immigrant cook in New York City as an asymptomatic carrier of the pathogen that causes typhoid fever. Her name was Mary Mallon, and we make...
Read More
Let’s see if we can figure out why this paper-thin work of fiction won wide recognition and a literary award for its author. Snow Hunters introduces . . . let’s count them: eight characters in 226 pages: Yohan, a North Korean soldier captured by UN forces late in the Korean war; Peng,...
Read More
Meet the Fitzmaurices, a wealthy, aristocratic British family with more than their share of buried secrets. But, like most secrets, they can’t remain hidden forever. And as they come to light, the family unravels. But the roots of their exposure lie far in the past at an elite “public...
Read More
A review of River of Smoke, by Amitav Ghosh. @@@@ (4 out of 5). The second book in Amitav Ghosh’s planned Ibis trilogy set among the momentous events of the massive 19th-Century opium trade between India and China. Details the life at sea and in the foreign enclave in Canton of the immensely rich men who dominated the trade, principally Britons and Americans.
Read More
Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi died at the hands of her Sikh bodyguards on October 31, 1984. Violence erupted immediately. Anti-Sikh riots raged for four days, resulting in the deaths of thousands of Sikhs. Eight years later, in December 1992, an organized mob of 70,000 Hindu nationalists...
Read More
Three big things happened in America in March 1933. On the fourth day of the month, Franklin Delano Roosevelt took the oath of office as President. He immediately declared a national banking holiday, temporarily closing every bank in the US and freezing financial transactions. And on March 10, a...
Read More
A review of They Eat Puppies, Don’t They?, by Christopher Buckley. It’s political satire of the highest order. I found myself laughing hysterically, sometimes for pages at a time. But, like all superior satire, this book isn’t just funny—it’s spot on target.
Read More
Women did not begin to gain any measure of equality with men until sometime in the 20th century. So it is always inspiring to read about women whose accomplishments were so outstanding that even under the most egregious pressure of misogyny they made their mark on history. One exceptional woman,...
Read More
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 book about the...
Read More
Explorers today plumb the oceans’ trenches and the vast reaches of solar space. For the truly adventurous who seek to cross humanity’s last frontiers, few if any big challenges remain on land. But a century and a half ago, the opportunities for Western explorers to make their mark were...
Read More
No one is still alive with any adult memory of World War I, which ended a century ago. So when we think of the events that have shaped the world we live in today it’s likely World War II looms large. But its antecedent three decades earlier may have had greater long-term impact. The...
Read More
The young Indo-American author Megha Majumdar made a splash with her award-winning debut, A Burning. This powerful New York Times bestseller painted a searing portrait of life in India today, with a focus on corruption, terrorism, and Hindu nationalism. Now, in her second novel, she ventures into...
Read More
Over the course of two decades late in the 18th century, the neighbors of what was then called the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth progressively seized portions of its territory on three occasions. History records those actions as the three Partitions of Poland. The result was to eliminate...
Read More
Truth to tell, I don’t know whether the 26 books I’ve listed below are, in fact, the “best” books of the year 2025. All I know is that they’re the best books I’ve read and reviewed during the past 12 months. In fact, a few of them were published in earlier years. I just didn’t discover them until...
Read More
If you’ve read The Prince, you probably think you know the work of Niccolo Machiavelli. Chances are, you think of him—as I always did—as the Renaissance propagandist who lionized a lying, cheating, brutal scoundrel as the ideal political and military leader. Having read The Malice of...
Read More
More than half a century ago, Elmore Leonard was eking out a living writing pulp Western novels. He was about to take a sharp turn into crafting the crime novels that would establish his reputation as one of the most brilliant stylists in the genre and earn him both wide recognition and a lot of...
Read More
Most of Carl Hiaasen’s 16 previous adult novels have centered on the destruction of Florida’s natural beauty. He has skewered corrupt developers, crooked politicians, and rapacious billionaires as well as assorted low-life scumbags and con men. The man’s body of work opens a...
Read More
American writer Anthony Marra began winning major literary awards when he was still in his 20s. He won seven for A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. But he deserves another one simply for having the guts to write it. The book’s setting is the Caucasus, no less, and during the worst of...
Read More
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.