Here we have a strange, depressing, dystopian novel about a suicide prevention clinic that trains and supplies suicide bombers to terrorist groups. It’s satire, I suppose. Now, if you can swallow that premise, you might enjoy Empty Hearts, a thriller of sorts by the German lawyer and author...
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Estimated reading time: 4 minutes Three North Korean teens fleeing North Korea find one another over the Chinese border and end up cowering together in a cave, hiding from the police who would send them back. The three couldn’t be more different. Yongju is the treasured son of the #11...
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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes Sixty thousand years ago our species began migrating out of Africa, and we’ve been on the move ever since. Today, war, climate change, criminal gangs, and rising expectations of a good life drive ever-larger numbers of people from their homelands—usually in...
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To understand how the American political system is unraveling, look no further than the state of Texas. Although Republicans had been making gains since John Tower won LBJ’s seat in the United States Senate in 1961, it wasn’t until 2003 that the Texas Republican Party gained undisputed...
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Throughout the 300,000-year history of humankind, people have moved about the Earth as individuals, in families, and sometimes in massive numbers. The immigration crises now facing Europe and North America are symptoms of this reality. And they will only grow more severe as climate change drives...
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Wuraola is the daughter of a wealthy and privileged medical family in a major provincial Nigerian town. She’s now in her first year of practice as a physician. Her mother, a physician herself, is pressuring her to marry because she is nearing thirty. And Wuraola is, in fact, in love with...
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Estimated reading time: 4 minutes Elon Musk gets all the attention these days. But back around the turn of the century, when they merged their companies to form PayPal, Musk’s partner Peter Thiel was at least equally prominent. The German-American venture capitalist and entrepreneur, a...
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Perhaps this has happened to you, too. You read a book that you know is supposed to be funny, but it just doesn’t work for you. The story is absurd, so the author’s intent is clear, and the complications that ensue are worthy of the Marx Brothers. It seems as though it all should be...
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For millennia, the huge peninsula we call India today has been Asia’s pivot. South of the central Asian steppes, midway between the European trade routes of the Middle East, the Chinese behemoth, and the East African coast, India has long been one of the most diverse places on the planet....
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Few Americans can locate Zimbabwe on a map. For that small number who can, our knowledge of the country tends to be limited to a handful of facts. That Zimbabwe is a former British colony known as Southern Rhodesia. That a man named Robert Mugabe led the country to independence from the British in...
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Americans are famously ignorant of life in other countries. Only about one-third of us have valid and unexpired passports (and that’s double what it was thirty years ago). But even those who do are most likely to visit Mexico or Canada, which account for the overwhelming majority of our...
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Here we have a great example of what happens when a brilliant comic writer decides to get “serious.” I’ve read four, and reviewed three, of Gary Shteyngart’s previous books. I loved the novels Absurdistan and Super Sad True Love Story and his memoir, Little Failure. I...
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As a Peace Corps Volunteer in the 1960s, I learned about culture shock. First, working with Quechua-speaking indigenous people in Ecuador, whose lives were unfathomable to me. And again when I returned to the states after nearly four years abroad, paralyzed by the unimaginable variety of choices...
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Gifty’s big brother Nana, a championship basketball player, was just a few years away from a likely berth in the NBA when he died of a heroin overdose, and her mother, a Ghanaian immigrant, had lain depressed in bed for years. So, it’s unsurprising that she herself had turned to a...
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There’s a world of hurt in the best satire. At times, it’s inescapable. And that’s certainly the case with Charles Yu’s widely acclaimed second novel, Interior Chinatown. Couched as a filmscript, the book is the tale of a young Chinese-American man struggling to gain a...
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Nearly a decade ago, just five months after this novel was published, a brilliant nonfiction book entitled Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity illuminated the drama of life in one of the teeming slums that cluster together near the Mumbai international...
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Few of us who live in comfortable circumstances—or just about anyone else, in fact—in the Global North can fully appreciate the impact of poverty and official corruption that runs rampant in so many of the nations clustered in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This is the reality the debut novelist...
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Meet Milo Burke, as inept, unstable, and self-doubting as any anti-hero who’s ever walked the earth. A failed painter whose sophomoric delusions of grandeur have long since drowned in waves of self-pity, Milo is employed in fundraising at what he insists on calling Mediocre University in New...
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Science Fiction Monday includes my latest SF book review, with links to other science fiction content.
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.
Science Fiction Monday includes my latest SF book review, with links to other science fiction content.
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.