The Latest

SCIENCE FICTION

MYSTERIES & THRILLERS

Those lady detectives in Botswana save baby elephants

Why, I keep asking myself, do I continue to read these books about two ladies who operate as private detectives in Gaborone, Botswana? After all, they're not really detectives. They don't investigate crime and almost never encounter the police. They "help solve people's...

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NONFICTION

He ran the morgue on 9/11. The job took years.

He ran the morgue on 9/11. The job took years.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Shiya Ribowsky walked to work. It was a beautiful day, and he was in no hurry. As director of identifications at New York City’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME), he knew death keeps its own schedule. Then the first plane struck...

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Popular Fiction

Laughs in sci-fi? P. G. Wodehouse did humor better.

Laughs in sci-fi? P. G. Wodehouse did humor better.

The legendary English humorist Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (1881-1975), known to readers as P. G., wrote about 100 books in a career that spanned much of the 20th century. His output included 71 novels, 24 collections of short stories, 42 plays, three memoirs, and a lot...

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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.

Check out our rotating random selection here, culled from throughout this site.

Happy reading!

 

Cover image of "The Peking Express," a book about a Chinese hostage crisis

When bandits toppled China’s government

China has suffered through a series of titanic convulsions over the past two centuries. The Opium Wars, when the West seized control of the country. The Taiping Rebellion, which killed thirty million, and the Boxer Rebellion, when the West occupied Beijing. Fall of the Qing Dynasty. Japanese...
The Man From Beijing by Henning Mankell

Henning Mankell leaves Kurt Wallender behind on a trip to Beijing

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes Before Stieg Larsson and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, there was Henning Mankell, the long-reigning Swedish king of crime fiction with his internationally popular series of detective novels featuring the world-weary policeman, Kurt Wallander. With The Man From...
The Lady in the Lake features shifting point of view.

Laura Lippman’s shifting point of view in her latest novel

When we read fiction, few of us notice the point of view the author's employing. Typically, a novel or short story is written in either the first person ("I did it") or the third ("She did it"). Period. Of course, there are variations on these approaches — many of them, actually — but they tend to...
Landfall presents a sympathetic portrait of George W. Bush.

A novelist’s sympathetic portrait of George W. Bush

George W. Bush served in the Oval Office from 2001 to 2009. His two terms in office encompassed 9/11, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, and the global financial collapse that set off the Great Recession—surely, the most consequential sequence of events in any eight years in...
Cover image of "Prodigy," the second novel in a YA sci-fi trilogy

In this YA sci-fi trilogy, Marie Lu imagines a novel future for the United States

Marie Lu's engrossing YA sci-fi trilogy offers a dystopian vision of the future US. In Legend, the first book, the action takes place exclusively within the Republic. Its territory corresponds to the Western states of today's US. There, a military dictatorship holds sway under the banner of...
Cover image of "The Premonition," a book about the COVID pandemic

What went wrong in the COVID pandemic?

In a full-page ad for Michael Lewis' new book inside the front cover of the New York Times Magazine (May 9, 2021), the publisher asks, "Where did we go wrong? And how can we get it right?" After all, as the ad states, "In 2019, a panel of public health experts judged the U.S. to be more prepared...
Cover image of "Station Eleven," a novel about life after the apocalypse

Life on Earth after the apocalypse

This is not the plot for Emily St. John Mandel's captivating post-apocalyptic novel, Station Eleven: Doctor Eleven has fled the destruction of Earth to take up residence on Station Eleven, a space station the size of a small planet that is nearly covered by water. (He has taken his name from that...
Norwegian police: Nemesis by Jo Nesbo

Gypsies, bank robbers, and the Norwegian police

A review of Nemesis, by Jo Nesbo. @@@@ (4 out of 5). Idiosyncratic Norwegian detective Harry Hole finds himself suspected of killing an old girlfriend while he works to identify the killer in a bank robbery.

Forgotten Ally is a history of A gripping history of China in World War II.

A gripping history of China in World War II

Read just about any popular history of World War II, and you'll find any number of references to the Allies as the Big Three of Britain, the US, and the Soviet Union. What's missing is recognition that China bore nearly as high a price as the USSR, with an estimated fourteen to twenty million dead...
Cover image of "Sleeping Giants" by Sylvain Neuvel, a sci-fi novel

An entertaining if puzzling sci-fi novel

Every once in a while you come across a work of fiction so puzzling that you simply can't put it down. No matter that the story seems not just farfetched but downright silly. The narrative drive, the sheer suspense, keep you turning the pages all the way to the end. If you can't figure out why,...

My Most Popular Reviews

Weekly Reviews Delivered to You!

Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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