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How Adolf Hitler raised the money to finance his rise

How Adolf Hitler raised the money to finance his rise

From its early days following World War I, what Hitler later renamed the Nazi Party had a powerful political sponsor behind the scenes: the Thule Society. Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw notes that the organization's "membership list ... reads like a Who's Who of early Nazi...

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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 "The Fifties,"

They fought for change in the 1950s

We look upon the 1950s as a decade of conformity when little of consequence happened in the United States. But sweeping generalizations about any period in history are misleading at best, and none more so than about the Fifties. Because the period from the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950...
Avogadro Corp is a cautionary tale about artificial intelligence.

A cautionary tale about artificial intelligence

You'll recognize Google in the eponymous company, Avogadro Corp, which is at the center of this disturbing science fiction novel. The range of products is similar. The company's cofounder is Sean Leonov and is the son of Russian immigrants. It's an obvious reference to Google's Moscow-born...
Empire of Resentment by a scholar of Right-Wing politics analyzes the Trump movement.

A scholar of Right-Wing politics dissects the Trump coalition

Here's America's leading scholar of Right-Wing politics with an up-to-the-minute analysis of the contending forces that have seized hold of the Republican Party. Because, as UC Berkeley's Lawrence Rosenthal explains in Empire of Resentment, conservatism comes in many flavors, of which the...
Churchill's Hellraisers

A thrilling British special forces mission in WWII Italy

You might think everything that could have been written about World War II has already reached a wider public, especially now that even the oldest veterans and survivors are passing from the scene. But you would be wrong. An excellent case in point is British author Damien Lewis' Churchill's...

Race relations in colonial Africa through the eyes of a Swedish novelist

Among the countless books and plays written by the masterful Swedish writer Henning Mankell are nine novels and one collection of five short stories about the life and work of a troubled police detective named Kurt Wallander in the town of Ystad, Sweden. The Wallander series, which has been...
Cover image of "The Seersucker Whipsaw," by Ross Thomas

A terrific novel for political junkies about Africa by Ross Thomas

Clint Shartelle is a honey-tongued Southerner who wears impeccable three-piece suits and drinks like a fish. (Do fish actually drink? Whatever.) Shartelle claims to be one sixty-fourth Native American, one-twelfth African-American, and the country's best political campaign manager. Apparently, he...
Cover image of "The Edge of Anarchy,"

The American labor movement in the Gilded Age

Today's widening gap between rich and poor—the billionaires versus the rest of us—is often compared to that in the Gilded Age. Then, the parties involved were the Robber Barons at society's pinnacle and the working men and women whose labor generated the obscene wealth the rich displayed with such...
The End of October is a thriller about a pandemic.

An all-too timely thriller about a pandemic

Lawrence Wright's novel debuted as COVID-19 flared up around the world, so it's no surprise that the book has been marketed as a thriller about a pandemic. It is that, of course, but only in part. More accurately described, The End of October is a story of human folly and the self-destructive...
By the Light of Burning Dreams

Chronicling the incomplete second American Revolution

Americans have short memories. Our failure to read history leads us to believe that nothing in our past could equal the dangers posed by the crises that threaten us today. We forget those times when the nation's very existence hung in the balance. 1776, when the American project might well have...
The Other Americans

The immigrant experience in America through many eyes

Then-Senator John F. Kennedy's 1958 book, A Nation of Immigrants, brought to light a historical reality that few at the time had thought much about. Fewer than ten million out of 180 million Americans were foreign-born then. But by 1990, following the generous Immigration Act of 1965, that number...

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Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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