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SCIENCE FICTION

MYSTERIES & THRILLERS

The best spy novelists writing today

The best spy novelists writing today

The first espionage novels appeared early in the 19th century with the publication of James Fenimore Cooper's The Spy in 1821 and The Bravo in 1831. A few other notable titles were published in the ensuing decades, and Sherlock Holmes got into the act around the turn...

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NONFICTION

Roger Ailes: the man who built Fox News and divided America

Roger Ailes: the man who built Fox News and divided America

As a teenager growing up in the 1950s in Lima, Ohio, (population 50,000 then), I learned that our local daily, The Lima News, had been purchased by a man named R. C. Hoiles. Hoiles lived in Orange County, California, and was a member of the John Birch Society. He owned a chain...

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Popular Fiction

Love, disease, and self-deception: the life of Typhoid Mary

Love, disease, and self-deception: the life of Typhoid Mary

Shortly after the 19th century turned into the 20th, a medical sleuth named George Soper, whom we would today call an epidemiologist, identified a young Irish immigrant cook in New York City as an asymptomatic carrier of the pathogen that causes typhoid fever. Her name was Mary...

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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!

 

Powers and Thrones

Change in the Middle Ages came thick and fast

Today the term "medieval" implies ignorance, backwardness, and barbarism. It's the fruit of the long-held belief that the millennium between the implosion of Rome and the fall of Constantinople in 1453 were the "Dark Ages," when monks were hunched over manuscripts in candlelight and little of...
1920s Shanghai is the setting for Death in Shanghai.

In a grim historical thriller, a serial killer strikes in 1920s Shanghai

Nineteen-twenties Shanghai harbored both the best and the worst of China in the early decades after the fall of the Qing Dynasty. It was the largest city in the country, the most prosperous, and the most dynamic. Since the mid-19th century, Europeans and Americans had controlled the wealthiest...
Cover image of "Pale Rider" by Laura Spinney, a book that cautions us about a future pandemic.

Was the Spanish Flu of 1918 a greater disaster than World War II?

A future pandemic of devastating proportions is all too possible given our limited understanding of how to predict the emergence of new strains of killer flu. History could well prove that the COVID-19 pandemic gave us only a foretaste of what is to come. But there is worse in our history. Much...

Why the Great Recession happened — and the Great Depression before it

Today, many Americans puzzle over why the Great Recession happened. Amazon lists more than 1,000 books on the subject. But readers today might benefit from taking a longer view. Because, as Frederick Lewis Allen told the tale in The Lords of Creation nearly ninety years ago, the conditions that...
The Andalucian Friend

A rollercoaster ride into an international gang war

The publisher and critics alike have chosen to compare this novel to the Lisbeth Salander stories of Stieg Larsson. But I see no valid comparison. The protagonist, Sophie Brinkmann, is a widowed nurse with a fifteen-year-old son. She could hardly be any different from the diminutive, ass-kicking...
2034

The Third World War breaks out in 2034, but not how you think

A squadron of three US destroyers sails on a "freedom of navigation" mission in the disputed waters of the South China Sea. Nearby a smaller vessel is gushing smoke, and Captain Sara Hunt, the squadron's commodore, orders her warships to veer off course to investigate. They find a small craft...

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 "Megatech," a book about the future of technology

Surveying the future of technology in the mid-21st century

The concluding chapter in The Economist's new book, Megatech: Technology in 2050, highlights "the central role of capitalism" in driving the demand for new technology. The preceding 19 chapters justify that reading, for the most part indirectly. That should be no surprise in a product of The...
The Widows of Malabar Hill highlights the Parsi minority.

The first woman lawyer in Bombay solves a baffling mystery

I'll admit it. I enjoy reading mysteries and thrillers, and I have a special preference for historical fiction. But when an author brings the two genres together and does a superior job in both of them, I'm entranced. And that's certainly the case with The Widows of Malabar Hill. Sujata Massey's...
Cover image of "The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store," one of the best historical novels set in America

10 best historical novels set in America

You may want to know what I mean by promising the “10 best historical novels set in America.” So, allow me to disclose here at the outset that I don’t claim this is a list of the best such novels ever published. Or even the best published in recent years. These books represent the best historical...

My Most Popular Reviews

Weekly Reviews Delivered to You!

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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