RealClearBooks - Book News, Book Reviews, Publishing Industry Aggregator

IF YOU DON'T immediately understand Baron Davis, just wait a few minutes. The retired NBA All-Star is a man of ambitions, concepts,... Read More

They need somebody like Bill Shakespeare in Hollywood today. Read More

I first encountered Martha C Nussbaum in 1987. She was a guest on Bryan Magee’s BBC television series The Great... Read More

Great ideas are a splendid thing, and those that are true, even better. But ideas are embodied things, rooted in the real world — and... Read More

Our cultural malaise—despair, alienation, idleness—is rooted in the loss of myths, particularly in literature. Social media and... Read More

Whatever your feelings about the internet and its tortuous torrential stream of information, misinformation, fragments of dialogue, rants,... Read More

I started gambling in the hallways of my middle school in Chicago when I was 9 or 10. My friends and I would play some corrupted version of... Read More

Some years ago, in a condition of acute emotional distress, I found myself in the office of the resident psychologist on a unit of a mental... Read More

The Elks, the Shriners, and the bowling leagues are too far gone to be mourned. Even our dining has become solitary if our... Read More

John W. Miller’s The Last Manager might sound like the kind of overcooked title you slap on a clickbait article, but the bold... Read More

He was the author of probably the most loved and admired novel ever written in Italian, but when Giuseppe Tomasi, Prince of Lampedusa, died... Read More

After World War II, the Franco-Swiss architect who went by the name of Le Corbusier erected brazenly expressionistic buildings, including an... Read More

Iconic though the name “Dracula” has become in our culture, it is, in fact, a diminutive. The Transylvanian potentate Vlad III,... Read More

This story contains mild spoilers for Mickey 17. When the indie distributor Neon recently won their second Best Picture Oscar with Anora, it... Read More

I don’t know about you, but the first two months of 2025 have felt like two years. We live in uncertain and, ahem, interesting times,... Read More

The Great Gatsby is 100 years old this year, which feels right in a way. After all those years as a perennial mainstay of the American... Read More

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say I think some of the Trump/Musk hatchet blows to government spending seem bad. Take the... Read More

Parasite, 2020’s Best Picture winner, is director Bong Joon Ho’s second-best film about the depredations of... Read More

Last year, on the day after Christmas, I went alone to the WWE Holiday Tour Live at Madison Square Garden, where I sat in nosebleed seats. I... Read More

We live, largely, in a utilitarian world. This is not a state of affairs I welcome but it’s one, having survived the American... Read More

One could almost be forgiven for forgetting that Chimananda Ngozie Adichie is a novelist. Well over a decade has passed since she published... Read More

California Governor Gavin Newsom doesn’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. The presumptive 2028 presidential... Read More

One of the most important but largely unsung heroes of the Reagan Era was movie-maker John Hughes. A close friend of P. J. O’Rourke,... Read More

2025 marks the centenary of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. It is one of a few contenders, and perhaps the frontrunner, for the... Read More

Writing a book about Joan Didion is a good way to discover that many people love her but far fewer people have read much of her work. In the... Read More

There really was a woman who photocopied her butt at a workplace in the 1980s. Curtis Sittenfeld, 49, heard about the incident when she was a... Read More

Early into Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s new novel, narrator Chiamaka, or “Chia,” muses on the two women who matter most to... Read More

“Gambling is inevitable. No matter what is said or done by advocates or opponents of gambling in all its various forms, it is an... Read More

The air was crisp and dry on the top of Mount Lemmon. The peeling white paint of telescope domes turned pink with the setting sun. At an... Read More

Fifteen years after her blockbuster novel “The Help” sparked conversation and criticism for its portrayal of the lives of Black... Read More

The Magic Bag. It’s a familiar storytelling device. Ask the bag for something, anything, whatever you might want—and poof,... Read More