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

Bombay’s sole female lawyer investigates early Bollywood

Bombay’s sole female lawyer investigates early Bollywood

The American motion picture industry, which we know as "Hollywood," began in the early 1910s when filmmakers migrated to California. By 1915, they had established a global cinema hub. But filmmaking grew early in India, too. The first Hndi-language feature film produced there,...

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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!

 

Cover image of "The Days to Come," a novel about an effort to address climate change

This new President tries to address climate change

People as diverse as Bill Gates, Greta Thunberg, and Paul Hawken, among many others, have advanced scores of ideas about how to address climate change. But is there a single idea that holds the greatest promise of quick, large-scale action? In author Tom Rosenstiel's fast-moving political...
Cold Storage is a biological thriller.

A biological thriller that may keep you up at night

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes Warning: this novel is a biological thriller that might keep you up at night. You'll meet a lot of people in Cold Storage, but four are key. The first two you'll encounter are officers in the U. S. Air Force. Lt. Col. Trini Romano and Major Roberto Diaz are on...
Cover image of "Jeeves and the Wedding Bells," a new Jeeves and Wooster novel

A new Jeeves and Wooster novel is almost as funny as the originals

What is this? A new Jeeves and Wooster novel? Didn't P. G. Wodehouse die in 1975? Surprise! Long after the authors died, new novels kept coming out in the bestselling series by Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Tom Clancy, Ian Fleming, Vince Flynn, Stieg Larsson, Robert Ludlum, and Robert B....
Cover image of "The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection," an exceptional tale

An exceptional tale of Botswana’s #1 Ladies’ Detective Agency

A review of The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection, by Alexander McCall Smith. @@@@ (4 out of 5). The 13th and latest in Smith’s best-known series of novels about the #1 Ladies’ Detective Agency in Gaborone, the capital of the small, land-locked nation of Botswana, bordering South Africa. To my mind, it’s one of the best.

Cover image of "The Common Good" by Robert B. Reich, a book about what ails American society

Robert Reich diagnoses what ails American society

Robert B. Reich examines the American body politic with a critical eye in his new book, The Common Good, and finds it dangerously diseased. The former Secretary of Labor, now a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, laments the loss of a commitment to public morality...
Cover image of "Dominion," an award-winning alternate history

A what-if history of the English Resistance

London. 1952. Twelve years earlier, the United Kingdom had surrendered to Nazi Germany following a brief and humiliating war in Norway. Now, Prime Minister Lord Beaverbrook leads a cabinet that includes the Fascist leader, Sir Oswald Mosley, in the critical post of Home Minister. Mosley's police...
Cover image of "The Future of Another Timeline," a feminist alternate history.

Alternate feminist history by a gifted science fiction author

What is history, and how does it work? We know, of course, that history isn't fixed and immutable. It's subject to the revision and reinterpretation of successive waves of scholars. Sometimes the fresh approach is based on new information that comes to light. But more often what we call history is...
Talking to Strangers is Malcolm Gladwell's latest book.

Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book explains recent history

The rap about Malcolm Gladwell in exalted literary and intellectual circles is that he writes about social psychology but isn't a social psychologist. Usually, though, the criticism is less polite. Although his books are bestsellers and widely cited in public discourse—think especially of The...
My Not So Perfect Life is a great example of British humor.

“Chick lit?” Wikipedia thinks so. But oh, so funny!

Kate, Katie, or Cat Brenner is 26 years old. The name she uses depends on the circumstances. She grew up on a farm in rural Somerset, raised largely by her father after her mother died when Kate was very young. Her dream has been to work at a London branding agency, and finally she has managed to...
Smoke and Ashes is set in colonial Calcutta.

A brilliantly constructed murder mystery set in colonial Calcutta

The Indian independence movement was nearly a century in the making (1857-1947). By 1921, when thousands of Indian troops had returned from fighting for their king-emperor in World War I, the movement began shifting into high gear. Mohandas Gandhi's policies of nonviolence and civil disobedience...

My Most Popular Reviews

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Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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Mal Warwick

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…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.

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