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!

 

The microbes within us, good and bad

If you're a physician, a nutritionist, or have studied biology, you're probably aware that our bodies contain an immense number of microbes. Most of the rest of us find that surprising. Though I knew about the bugs that inhabit my digestive system, British science journalist Ed Yong helped me...
Cover image of "The Relic Master," one of the satirical novels Christopher Buckley writes

Christopher Buckley writes satirical novels that are very, very funny

It's no accident that Christopher Buckley writes such funny satirical novels. He is, pure and simple, a very funny man. I know this not just because I've read his books, which generally "kept me in stitches" (whatever that means), but also because I actually spent much of an evening with him not...
Cover image of "Exposure," a suspenseful thriller

Gay life in Britain in a suspenseful thriller

Though marketed as an espionage thriller, this suspenseful thriller is more precisely about the fragility of gay life in the UK half a century ago. It quickly becomes obvious that this will turn out to be a major underlying theme in the action that follows. Espionage also emerges as central in a...
Good books about climate change describe these effects.

Good books about climate change

Some call it a hoax. For most of the rest of us, myself assuredly included, it’s the climate emergency or the climate crisis. And no matter what you “believe,” climate change is underway. It’s warming the planet. It’s accelerating. It holds the potential to end the long march of the human race...
1942

What if Japan had finished the job at Pearl Harbor?

The hinge of history turns on chance, and alternate history grabs that insight and shakes it in our faces. When we ask the "what if" questions that arise as we ponder the past, historians shrug. The gist of their responses tends to be "it is what it is." But a small number of authors who indulge...

Michael Lewis: “The stock market is rigged!”

Bestselling Berkeley author Michael Lewis has been spending a lot of time in the East lately. After researching and writing his blockbuster fifteenth nonfiction book, Flash Boys, currently the country's #1 best seller, he's now juggling interviews and appearances triggered by the fallout. I can't...
Cover image of "Ah, Treachery!," the final Ross Thomas novel.

Colorful characters and lots of surprises in the final Ross Thomas novel

In the final Ross Thomas novel, the master was at his best. The late Ross Thomas wrote some of America's most fondly remembered novels about politics, espionage, and crime, creating some of the most colorful characters in the genre. One measure of the esteem in which Thomas was held by his peers...
The Continuum

An ingenious take on time travel

Novels about time travel frequently twist themselves into knots about the paradox that comes into play when travelers attempt to change something in the past that might mean they would never have been born. In The Continuum, the first of a series by science fiction newcomer Wendy Nikel, the...
The Future of Humanity is one of 20 good nonfiction books about the future.

Good nonfiction books about the future

Will the future be dystopian? Can the human race even survive climate change and the ongoing mass extinction? Or does technology promise a far better and more hopeful future? The two dozen nonfiction books listed here offer a wide range of perspectives on these questions. They explore the impact...
The Patient Assassin is about the Amritsar Massacre.

The story of the Amritsar Massacre that sped up the Indian independence movement

If you're ever tempted to think that colonialism was a good thing, here's the place to start. (I'm assuming you haven't read Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost, an extraordinary exposé of Belgian rule in what is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo. If not, check it out after this one.)...

My Most Popular Reviews

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Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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Mal Warwick

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