The Latest

Books about extraordinary women

Books about extraordinary women

You won’t recognize some of the names on this list of exceptional women. Most were little known even in their own time. They represent a wide range of activities, from espionage to politics to science and to running their countries. But what they have in common with the three...

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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

NONFICTION

Books about extraordinary women

Books about extraordinary women

You won’t recognize some of the names on this list of exceptional women. Most were little known even in their own time. They represent a wide range of activities, from espionage to politics to science and to running their countries. But what they have in common with the three...

read more

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 "Behind the Beautiful Forevers," a book about poverty in India

A searing look at poverty in India that reads like a novel

A review of Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, by Katherine Boo. @@@@@ (5 out of 5). Boo focuses on the experiences of two slum families, one consisting of 11 Muslim immigrants from India’s north who have built a business as garbage-brokers, the other family whose matriarch is affiliated with Shiv Sena, one of the most extreme and violent anti-Muslim political parties in India.

Historical perspective on the surprising rise of Barack Obama

The White House has been home to many colorful characters in the more than two centuries since it was first occupied in 1800—think of the polymath Thomas Jefferson, the swashbuckling Andrew Jackson, and the big game hunter and peacemaker Teddy Roosevelt—but Barack Obama is at least their equal....
Cover image of "The Devil's Chessboard," one of the good nonfiction national security books

Top nonfiction books about national security

National security may be defined in several ways. In the broadest view, national security encompasses the state of the economy, access to necessary raw materials, the strength of governmental institutions, and public morale. Viewed most narrowly, national security is largely limited to the...
Nightwings is set on a far future Earth.

A science fiction master imagines a far future Earth

Robert Silverberg has been writing science fiction since he was fourteen years old, and that was a long time ago. (1949, actually.) He's written hundreds of books and scores of short story collections and been richly rewarded for his work: four Hugo Awards, five Nebulas, and recognition as a Grand...
Devil in a Blue Dress

The suspenseful first Easy Rawlins detective novel

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes In 1948, the first In-N-Out Burger opened in Los Angeles, a harbinger of the car culture that would come to dominate the region. Farmland divided the city from the town of Santa Monica, and the population then fell short of two million. (It was only with the 1950...
The Eye of the Needle is a classic WWII spy novel.

The 40th anniversary edition of Ken Follett’s classic WWII spy novel

British author Ken Follett is best known to a wide public these days for the Kingsbridge Trilogy, his mammoth multi-generational account of an English cathedral town. Together, the three books run to nearly 3,000 pages (and a fourth, a more recent prequel, takes the total to nearly 4,000). They've...
The Quiet Americans

How the CIA helped set the course for a half-century of US policy

For most readers with a passing interest in espionage, the operations of the CIA beginning in the 1950s are reasonably familiar. But that's not the case of the Agency's work in the years immediately following World War II. Scott Anderson corrects that gap in The Quiet Americans, an illuminating...
Winterfair Gifts highlights the characters worthy of Shakespeare around Miles Vorkosigan.

A cast of characters worthy of Shakespeare

The charm of Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga derives not just from the enduring attraction of its central figure, the brilliant and confounding Miles Vorkosigan—"the little Admiral," the beguiling dwarf with a taste for (very) tall women. Equally appealing is the fascinating cast of...
Semiosis is a unique first contact story.

Can plants think? These colonists on an alien world learn the answer the hard way.

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes Why is it, do you think, that animals are capable of thought, and plants aren't? Or are they? Certainly, many aspects of plant behavior suggest conscious action. And at least one scientist, Daniel Chamovitz, director of the Manna Center for Plant Biosciences at...
Cover image of "Big History" by Cynthia Stokes Brown, with broad-perspective on world history.

New perspectives on world history

Less than three decades ago an American historian named David Christian who was teaching at an Australian university at the time offered new perspective on world history. His unique take on the subject took the discipline far beyond the limits of the written word. Calling it Big History, Christian...

My Most Popular Reviews

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Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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