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!

 

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 "Got Your Attention" is a book about communication

Communication that gets the point across

A few very clever people can turn a simple truth into a career. Sam Horn is one of them. Walking the well-worn path trod by Dale Carnegie (How to Win Friends and Influence People), Horn -- who is a she, by the way -- has crafted a useful little handbook for anyone in the business of communication....
Cover image of "The Lacuna," a book about Leon Trotsky

Leon Trotsky, Diego Rivera, and the Red Scare

When years ago I read The Poisonwood Bible, I was flummoxed by its power and beauty. It was clear to me that Barbara Kingsolver possessed a fierce talent not just as a storyteller but also as a wordsmith and a reporter. Her vivid prose brought into high relief the tragic reality of life in...
Cover image of "Artificial Wisdom,"

When the world votes on a dictator, an AI is a candidate

Recent years have seen an increasing volume of science fiction on environmental themes, and no wonder. Of course, the world has known about global warming for decades. But it's only in the past decade that the trend has become obvious to millions. And scientists who have dedicated themselves to...
Cover image of "The Whitehall Mandarin," a novel about nuclear espionage

In the early days of the Cold War, nuclear espionage in search of the H-bomb

The Whitehall Mandarin, Edward Wilson's complex and sophisticated novel of Cold War espionage, is the fourth book in a series that began with the The Envoy. That first book centered around the life of one Kit Fournier, an American intelligence officer who rose to become head of the CIA mission in...
Cover image of "At Risk" by Dame Stella Rimington

Dame Stella Rimington’s Liz Carlyle series of top-notch espionage novels

Ex-spooks with a modicum of writing ability sometimes turn to writing spy thrillers once they've left the world of espionage. Rarely, though, do we see fictional treatments of the game come from anyone who retired at the very top of the game. Dame Stella Rimington is one of what must be only a...
Cover image of "HItler's Gift," a book about the scientists who fled the Nazis

The scientists Hitler drove away helped the Allies win

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes Scan any list of the physicists, chemists, and other top scientists who created the atomic bomb under the Manhattan Project. What you'll find there, one after another, are the names of Europeans who'd fled the Nazis in the 1930s. They dominate the list, and their...
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...
Cover image of "Dark Angel,"

John Sandford’s badass young detective takes on dangerous hackers

In a series of 36 crime novels to date, John Sandford has traced the career of crack investigator Lucas Davenport for four decades. Marketed under the "Prey" umbrella, the books follow Davenport from his time in Minnesota, first on the city's police force, then in a senior role in the fictional...
Cover image of "A Short History of Nearly Everything," which refutes a myth about Charles Darwin

How Charles Darwin REALLY came to develop the theory of evolution

If you think you know the salient facts about Charles Darwin and evolution, prepare to be surprised when you read A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson. For starters, Charles Darwin was by no means the first person to posit a theory of evolution. His own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin,...

My Most Popular Reviews

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Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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Mal Warwick

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