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 "Right Out of California," a book about the origin of today's conservatism

How today’s conservatism grew in the cotton fields of California

Most observers of the emergence of today's "conservatism" in America locate its roots in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. They point to the works of Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Ayn Rand; the political campaigns of Barry Goldwater, George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan; the...
Cover image of "Fear," Bob Woodward's new book

Bob Woodward’s new book reveals how Trump makes policy

Here comes Bob Woodward's new book with the latest wrinkles in the tangled story of Donald Trump and his conduct in the White House. It might seem that everything of note has already been said. But Woodward demonstrates his journalistic chops in this meticulously researched account. Fear is far...
Los Alamos is one of Joseph Kanon's superb espionage thrillers.

Joseph Kanon’s spy thrillers are superb

Joseph Kanon served as editor in chief of the publishing houses Houghton Mifflin and E. P. Dutton in New York. He began his writing career in 1995 at age 49. Kanon's first novel, Los Alamos (1997), became a bestseller and received the Edgar...
A Game of Lies is set at the 1936 Summer Olympics.

Undercover at the 1936 Berlin Olympics

She navigates through Berlin during the 1936 Summer Olympics under an assumed name, interacting with a turncoat SS officer, a mercenary dwarf, and an aging anti-Nazi journalist. But for reporter Hannah Vogel it's just another episode in the long-running saga of her attempts to undermine Adolf...
Russia Without Putin explains why the Russian oligarchy is hostile.

Why is the Russian oligarchy hostile to the West?

In his new book, Russia Without Putin, Tony Wood tries to make the case that "too much attention has been paid to the man, and not enough to the system over which he presides." It's an intriguing claim, but Wood doesn't quite pull it off. The book consists of six chapters and an epilogue. And...
Nightmare Scenario

America’s nightmarish response to COVID

The phrase "nightmare scenario" in the title of this rushed exposé of the Trump Administration's response to COVID-19 has a double meaning. It refers, of course, to the pandemic itself. Not the worst case scenario like the 1918 influenza epidemic, which killed an estimated 50 million people, but...
Deacon King Kong is full of unforgettable characters.

Unforgettable characters in this delightful new novel

Why did Sportcoat, a deacon in the Five Ends Baptist Church, shoot Deems Clemens in broad daylight, right in front of his crew and the church ladies? Where does all that white-people's cheese come from like clockwork every year for Hot Sausage to deal it out to all the folks of the Causeway...
The Great Successor is a biography of Kim Jong Un.

A revealing, up-to-date biography of Kim Jong Un

Kim Jong Un is thirty-five years old now, but he's been the designated leader of his country since the age of eight. People decades older than him have been sucking up to him all his life. He is "five feet, seven inches tall, and his weight is estimated to be about three hundred pounds." The man...
Cover image of "Red Scare,"

The roots of today’s reactionary politics?

In high school civics classes or college courses in political science, many of us in the United States have learned a little about the Red Scare of the 1940s and 50s. A few keywords surface in memory. The Army-McCarthy hearings. HUAC. The Hollywood Blacklist. Richard Nixon's smear tactics. Joseph...
Cover image of "The Hanging Girl" by bestselling Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen

From a bestselling Danish author, an intriguing detective novel

In 1997, a beautiful 19-year-old schoolgirl is killed by a hit-and-run driver on a road near the school she's attending. Somehow, her body is throw up fourteen feet into a tree, where it remains hanging until a local police officer discovers her days later. The officer plunges into an obsessive...

My Most Popular Reviews

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Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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Mal Warwick

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