The Latest

SCIENCE FICTION

MYSTERIES & THRILLERS

A brilliant addition to a long-running thriller series

A brilliant addition to a long-running thriller series

Leonard Summers; his wife, Martha; and son, Bernard, are moving into a remote cabin in Minnesota. But his name isn't Leonard Summers. It's Leonid Sokolov. And "he was in some kind of enforcement branch of the Russian spy agency," Lucas Davenport explains to fellow US Marshal...

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NONFICTION

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!

 

The Zhivago Affair helped bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union.

How a novel helped speed the collapse of the Soviet Union

Historians squabble about how change has happened over the five thousand years of recorded human events. Is it the influence, whether malign or constructive, of those individuals called Great Men? Is it the material circumstances of society at a given moment in history, as a certain breed of...
Cover image of "Grunt," a book about military science

A journalist looks at military science, tongue in cheek

There's something seriously wrong with Mary Roach. Conjure up any vile, disgusting, or taboo subject that anyone in her right mind would shun -- and you'll find Mary Roach has written a book about it (or is probably planning to do so). Her books to date have dealt with cadavers, the afterlife,...
Cover image of "Rough Country" by John Sandford, one of the excellent Virgil Flowers novels.

John Sandford’s excellent Virgil Flowers novels

Bestselling crime novelist John Sandford originally developed Virgil Flowers as a character in his long-running Prey series starring Lucas Davenport (another fascinating and entirely original Sandford character). The 12 excellent Virgil Flowers novels are a spinoff from the longer series. Writing...
Cover image of "The Sisters Brothers," a novel about hired killers in the Old West

Hired killers, the California Gold Rush, and lots of surprises

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes Here's a Western that's more Deadwood than Gunsmoke. It had to be: it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. And the panjandrums who manage that process aren't known to show favor to run-of-the-mill genre writing. The Sisters brothers of the title are notorious...
Cover image of "The New Jim Crow," an account of mass incarceration in America

The tragedy of mass incarceration in America

A review of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander. ★★★★★. The United States now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, dwarfing the rates of nearly every developed country, even surpassing those in highly repressive regimes like Russia, China, and Iran. The number of prisoners of African-American and Latino descent is wildly out of proportion to their share of the general population, and the War on Drugs accounts for the lion’s share of the difference.

Cover image of "The Pretender,"

A royal scam in 15th century England

One day in 1480 a nameless nobleman and a priest show up at Will Collan's farm. They've come for his 12-year-old son, John. As they explain to the boy, he's not John Collan but a legitimate claimant to the English throne. As a small child, his partisans had hidden him away in the countryside to...
Cover image of "Up Against It," a sci-fi mystery mashup

Life, death, and politics in the asteroid belt

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes Why do some novels win Hugo or Nebula Awards while thousands of others don't? Is it because they're the "best?" Of course not. You and I know better than that. Like the Academy Awards or those in any other field, other factors enter the picture. Sometimes, how...
Cover image of "Gathering Prey," a novel about psychotic serial killers

Psychotic serial killers on the loose!

Now, 25 novels into John Sandford's excellent Lucas Davenport series, I'm beginning to wonder whether the population of Minnesota includes a wildly disproportionate number of psychotic serial killers. Of course, that's the case only in the author's fevered imagination -- which might lead me to...
Talking to Strangers is Malcolm Gladwell's latest book.

Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book explains recent history

The rap about Malcolm Gladwell in exalted literary and intellectual circles is that he writes about social psychology but isn't a social psychologist. Usually, though, the criticism is less polite. Although his books are bestsellers and widely cited in public discourse—think especially of The...
Kill Decision

Killer drones menace the USA in this military technothriller

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes Over the past two centuries, industrial technology has played an increasingly critical role in warfare. From the telegraph, ironclad steamships, and Gatling guns of the 19th century to the supersonic aircraft, computer-directed artillery fire, and drones of the...

My Most Popular Reviews

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Mal Warwick - Book Reviews

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Mal Warwick

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…includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.

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