The Latest

SCIENCE FICTION

What if Japan also had an atomic bomb in August 1945?

What if Japan also had an atomic bomb in August 1945?

Anyone with a passing knowledge of World War II is aware that Germany attempted to build a nuclear weapon. What is less well known is that Japan did so, too. Both programs failed, the Japanese more quickly and decisively than the German. But at least one prominent US-trained...

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MYSTERIES & THRILLERS

NONFICTION

The outrageous woman who helped shape the Gilded Age

The outrageous woman who helped shape the Gilded Age

Mark Twain satirized the period as the Gilded Age, suggesting that an overlay of gold plating hid the seamy reality underneath. Later, historians fixed the term to the years from the late 1870s to the late 1890s. Then, America emerged from the devastation of the Civil War to...

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Popular Fiction

This gorgeous Hollywood star was a brilliant inventor

This gorgeous Hollywood star was a brilliant inventor

Version 1.0.0 You might not think a biographical novel about a glamorous Hollywood star could figure in the history of World War II. But then you wouldn't reckon with the Austrian American actress Hedy Lamarr (1914-2000). Born Hedwig Kiesler in Vienna to a nonobservant Jewish...

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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!

 

Scattered Seeds

Eking out existence in a fast-changing world

For the people of the little community at the High Meadow Med Center, the world around them poses a growing threat. The government—whatever and wherever that may be—has shut down the train station they'd depended on for life-saving vaccines and food rations. The weather service no longer...
Cover image of "The Poet's Game," a novel about a spy in Moscow.

Paul Vidich launches a new series of compelling spy novels

When we first meet Alex Matthews, he is on an errand for his old friend, the CIA Director. Matthews had once served as Moscow Station Chief. Now, having left the Agency nine years earlier, he is in Moscow running an investment firm. But this night he is on his way to meet BYRON, a spy he'd...
Cover image of "The Fortunes,"

The Chinese American experience in America

A young Chinese man sold by his uncle to work in a San Francisco laundry. The film star Anna May Wong, who could never achieve the stardom she coveted. A young Chinese American man murdered by two drunken White men, mistaken for the Japanese who had "stolen" American jobs in the 1980s. And a...
The Admirals

The four men who led the US Navy in WWII

They were children of the Victorian Era. Annapolis graduates around the turn of the twentieth century. Junior officers in World War I, captains by 1927. They gained their first admiral's stars by the 1930s, and all four were near or past retirement age when war broke out. Yet they rose to the...
All About Me

Mel Brooks writes a very funny book

The most important thing I can tell you about the Mel Brooks memoir, All About Me!, is simply put. It took me twice as long to read the book as it otherwise would have because I spent so much time laughing my head off. Mel Brooks may not be the funniest man alive, but he's certainly near the top...
Cover image of "The Sassoons," z book about the famous family that grew wealthy trading opium

Trading opium, cotton, and textiles, they built a fortune

For a century, from the 1870s to the 1960s, their family name was one of the most recognizable in the world. They were wealthy beyond the limits of imagination, and they married into European royalty and other ultra wealthy families such as the Rothschilds. Their roots lay in ancient Babylon. For...
Cover image of "Resurrection Day," a novel about the aftermath of nuclear war

If the Cuban Missile Crisis had led to war

Ten years ago millions of Americans and Soviet citizens had died in a nuclear war. Washington DC, Miami, San Diego, and several other cities lie in rubble. The United States is now a second-rate power, dependent on aid from Great Britain. Chafing under martial law, the survivors struggle to feed...
Cover image of "The Book of the Unnamed Midwife," a feminist story

A powerful feminist story in a dystopian landscape

Meg Elison's debut novel, The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, won the prestigious Philip K. Dick Award and was included among the Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year, 2016, and Amazon Best Books of the Year, 2016. It's another sign that science fiction has come of age, no longer confined to a...
Cover image of "Evicted" by Matthew Desmond, a book about homelessness

Does the profit motive cause homelessness?

Between May 2008 and December 2009, a doctoral candidate in sociology named Matthew Desmond at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, lived in the poorest neighborhoods of Milwaukee in an effort to reach an understanding of poverty. He persuaded two landlords with property in the communities to...
Cover image of "The Untold Story of Books,"

In publishing, the writer usually comes last

Few people have any idea how many new books there are every year. According to Steven Piersanti, Founder and Senior Editor at Berrett-Koehler Publishers, quoting a 2023 report in Publishers Weekly, 2.3 million books were self-published in the US in 2021. And a recent industry estimate is that each...

My Most Popular Reviews

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Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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Mal Warwick

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