The Latest

SCIENCE FICTION

MYSTERIES & THRILLERS

A hilarious romp through the byways of small-town crime

A hilarious romp through the byways of small-town crime

To be clear at the outset, you should not expect a realistic picture of small-town crime when you read Justin Halpern's comic masterpiece, Get Lost. What you'll get instead is a fiendishly clever story that somehow involves a missing woman, corrupt almond farmers, a Big Box...

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NONFICTION

He could have been king. Or a dictator. He retired instead.

He could have been king. Or a dictator. He retired instead.

Myths and legends swirl around the life of George Washington. Remember that cherry tree? The wooden teeth? Throwing a coin across a wide river? The white wig? All of these widely accepted beliefs about our founding President are flatly untrue. And, just for the record, he was...

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Popular Fiction

American history, laughing all the way

American history, laughing all the way

Scoot yourself over, Huckleberry Finn! Make room! Here comes Henry Shackleford, aka Henrietta, aka Little Onion, with a tall tale ripped and twisted out of the pages of history that's like to set your britches afire. Yes, here's The Good Lord Bird, courtesy of James McBride, a...

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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 "Apothecary," a sci-fi historical fiction mashup

First Contact in the 16th Century

Bloody Mary reigns in England as this remarkable novel opens. It's 1558. Shakespeare had not yet been born, and the queen who would give her name to the Elizabethan Age was months away from gaining the throne. Mary's agent, the notorious Bishop Blaine, is terrorizing London with wild accusations...
The Nazi Menace

How the Western democracies stumbled into war with Nazi Germany

The events of the years 1937 through 1941 appear fixed in time. It seems foreordained that Britain, France, the US, and the USSR would have gone to war with Nazi Germany under any circumstances. But that was assuredly not the case, as historian Benjamin Carter Hett makes abundantly clear in his...
Cover image of "The Moscow Club," a spy thriller

Joseph Finder’s Moscow Club: a spy thriller to keep you up at night

Looking for a spy thriller that might keep you up at night? If you suspend disbelief, as science fiction writers ask you to do, you may enjoy this intricately plotted thriller from Joseph Finder, one of America's best contemporary novelists of suspense. For starters, you'll need to imagine a...
Cover image of "Intelligence" by Susan Hasler, a novel doubt the CIA under George W Bush

A satirical take on the dysfunctional CIA under George W Bush

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes Could the CIA under George W. Bush really be as clumsy and ineffectual as Susan Hasler portrays it in Intelligence? The dysfunctional agency she dramatizes is a bureaucracy tied up in knots. Some of them are of its own making. Others are handed down from a White...
The Pictures

A riveting tale of corruption in Hollywood’s Golden Age

On August 25, 1939, MGM's make-or-break production of The Wizard of Oz premiered at Grauman's Theater in Los Angeles. The picture represented the pinnacle of all that Louis B. Mayer aspired to project for the company. It was a wholesome film, a picture for the whole family, a celebration of the...
SARS-CoV-2-virus

Books about COVID-19 and other pandemics

As the son and brother of doctors, I’ve long had an intense interest in medical history. And I’ve been more aware than most Americans what the threat of epidemic disease represents to our future. That awareness came to the surface in 2017, when I published Hell on Earth: What we can learn from...
All About Me

Mel Brooks writes a very funny book

The most important thing I can tell you about the Mel Brooks memoir, All About Me!, is simply put. It took me twice as long to read the book as it otherwise would have because I spent so much time laughing my head off. Mel Brooks may not be the funniest man alive, but he's certainly near the top...

Joseph Smith: the remarkable man who founded the Mormon church

By any measure, he was a remarkable man. At a time in US history when religious passion was seizing hold of the American imagination, he was "the first prophet . . . to traffic in millenarian predictions, and he wasn't the last. But he was the most successful." It's all laid out in this intriguing...
Hidden Figures

The Black women who helped send Americans to the Moon

Before UNIVAC, before the IBM 650, computers were people. Nearly all of them were women, and many were Black. Employed by the thousand in the US war effort in World War II, they crunched the numbers and ran the equations to calculate the effects of wind on aircraft and the trajectory of artillery...
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...

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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