Mal Warwick on Books: Insightful Reviews and Recommendations

Twenty-nine-year-old Richard Newhall was teaching history at Harvard. Younger at 22, George Haydock, a Quaker, was a recent graduate, as was Alexander McKinlock a wealthy football hero. Younger still, William Morgan was an undergraduate there. By contrast, graduate George Redwood was a celerated journalist in Baltimore. And in 1917, these five Harvard men began their jour...

For years, Chief Inspector Chen Cao of the Shanghai Police Bureau had been widely celebrated as a “rising cadre” in the Communist Party. He was a man on his way up, rumored to soon be tapped as the Bureau’s Party Secretary. But his success has undone him. Chen has exposed too many influential men in his inquiries into corruption, and his connection with a powerful retired...

Meet the Fitzmaurices, a wealthy, aristocratic British family with more than their share of buried secrets. But, like most secrets, they can’t remain hidden forever. And as they come to light, the family unravels. But the roots of their exposure lie far in the past at an elite “public school” called Burtonbury. There, a scholarship boy named Martin Gilmour meets Ben Fitzm...

Biologically modern humans have roamed the Earth for some 300,000 years. Yet what we refer to as history dwells on the past 5,000 years or so, since writing was invented in ancient Sumer. Prehistory—what took place before then—was largely the subject of speculation until recently. But advances in archaeological science over the past several decades have been remarkable. T...

Ariel Pryce awakens to a sunny day in Lisbon only to find her new husband, John Wright, missing. After hours waiting for him to turn up, it’s clear something’s amiss. There’s no message, and no sign of him whatsoever. Fearing he’s fallen victim to an accident or been kidnapped, she turns to the American embassy. There, an unsympathetic consular official insists it’s much ...