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Ken Follett’s monumental saga of the First World War

Ken Follett’s monumental saga of the First World War

No one is still alive with any adult memory of World War I, which ended a century ago. So when we think of the events that have shaped the world we live in today it's likely World War II looms large. But its antecedent three decades earlier may have had greater long-term...

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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!

 

There There is a novel about urban Indian life.

A bestselling new novel casts a bright light on urban Indian life

If you're into alcoholism, wife-beating, absentee fathers, and drugs, or simply like to read about them, you may enjoy Tommy Orange's portrayal of urban Indian life in his new novel, There There. I didn't. I cannot be persuaded that everyone in the urban Indian community is a loser or a criminal....
Cover image of "Just One Damned Thing After Another"

Historians blunder around in the past in this time travel story

You think you know what you're in for after the first 29 words in the book. First, the author writes, "I made all this up. Historians and physicists—please do not spit on me in the street." Then she quotes Arnold Toynbee, who was not the first to express the sentiment (and didn't actually mean...
Cover image of "Russka," a novel of Russian history in fiction

A journey through Russian history in fiction

No country on Earth can boast a more tumultuous history than Russia. Born in the clash of marauding nomadic tribes nearly 2,000 years ago, this sprawling Euro-Asiatic nation has witnessed repeated bouts of foreign incursions, ethnic conflict, revolution, and a millennium of autocratic, and often...
The Bellini Card by Jason Goodwin

A very odd couple solves murders in this historical novel

It's 1840. A eunuch in service to the Ottoman sultan is, improbably, an accomplished detective, a gifted hand-to-hand fighter, and even a lover of women (or, at least, one woman) in this fanciful but flawed mystery story. Dr. Watson to Yashim's Sherlock Holmes is a Polish Count ejected from his...
Cover image of "Bios," a novel about genetically engineered colonists

Struggling for life in a hostile alien environment

Somewhere in the vast expanse of the Milky Way, with its hundreds of billions of stars and innumerable planets in orbit around them, intelligent life must have arisen. The circumstances of our emergence on Earth are unusual. But it's hubris of the highest order to insist that they're unique amid...
Cover image of "Razorblade Tears,"

Two ex-cons team up to avenge their sons’ murder

Since Intruder in the Dust (1948) by William Faulkner and James Dickey's Deliverance (1970) pioneered the genre, Southern noir has attracted a wide following. Scores of other authors have rushed to create works that evoke the grim atmospherics of the rural American South. But in recent years no...
Of Rice and Men

A comical tale about the Vietnam war

This is a comical Vietnam War novel. But that doesn't mean to suggest that Of Rice and Men is a funny story about men killing and being killed. There's far too much of that already. This is, instead, a novel about a company of American soldiers in Vietnam who specialize in what is called civil...
Cover image of "Present Danger" by Stella Rimington, one of the best spy novels recently

Do all the best spy novels come from Britain?

John le Carré. Eric Ambler. Graham Greene. Ian Fleming. Len Deighton. Frederick Forsyth. Somerset Maugham. Charles Cumming. Ken Follett. Alex Gerlis. Philip Kerr. Is that enough names to make the case that the best spy novels come from Britain? (Okay, maybe just in the English language.) Not that...
Red Widow

A poisoned CIA asset, and a hunt for a CIA mole

A Russian businessman dies on a plane from JFK to Washington National Airports. It seems to be a heart attack. But Lyndsey Duncan knows better. It was clearly poison. And the man was no businessman. He was, instead, a high-ranking officer in the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, the FSB. A...
Trading in Danger is the first book in a military science fiction series.

The launch of a promising military science fiction series

From 2003 to 2008, Elizabeth Moon published five books in the Vatta's War series. The first two books in a new series, Vatta's Peace, followed in 2017 and 2018. Trading in Danger, the first of these seven books, introduces Kylara Vatta, the nineteen-year-old scion of a wealthy family with an...

My Most Popular Reviews

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Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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Mal Warwick

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