RealClearBooks - Book News, Book Reviews, Publishing Industry Aggregator

Richard Holmes’s new biography, The Boundless Deep, depicts how Alfred Lord Tennyson absorbed the scientific discoveries of his era,... Read More

Christina and Eric Schwendeman’s travels had them bouncing around Asia for several months early last year. In the spring, the American... Read More

Rob Doyle’s Cameo has a distinctly “postmodern” resonance that seems almost archaic in the present moment. Three decades... Read More

I went out one afternoon to where the Grateful Dead rehearse, behind Bob’s Floating Homes on the Sausalito waterfront. (CORRECTION: Don... Read More

This past weekend, I reviewed the first half of the Met’s Raphael: Sublime Poetry, ending with some of his portraits, among them his... Read More

“It is not good for man to be alone.” This is the only time in pre-Fall Eden when God calls some part of his creation anything... Read More

Ben Lerner once described Gerald Murnane’s The Plains (1982) as a ‘bizarre masterpiece that can feel less like something... Read More

I love a novel that tells you why it was written, a novel that has a bit of backstage to it. It’s like sitting at the edge of a row of... Read More

Earlier this month, the New Yorker published a mesmerizing if bleak article about the “Disney adult” — that distinct... Read More

I have not run into them so often lately, but Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet and its constituent novels (Justine, Balthazar,... Read More

Netflix's splashy take on Lord of the Flies has renewed interest in the tale, which follows a group of British boys descending into savagery... Read More

The newspaper where Andy accepts a job at the end of The Devil Wears Prada is called ‘The New York Mirror’. The importance of... Read More

Douglas Stuart, author of the Booker Prize-winning Shuggie Bain, is becoming a problem. With the publication of his third novel, John of... Read More

Andrew David Edwards, in Money and the Making of the American Revolution, offers what his publisher describes as “a new interpretation... Read More

Last fall, I went to visit a friend in Lima, Peru, a city where ethnic ambiguity and occasional Asianness are part and parcel of daily life.... Read More

AN ODD THING HAS HAPPENED every time I’ve been in a theater where the trailer for The Sheep Detectives has played. At first, there is a... Read More

Is it even a week in America if everyone isn’t losing their minds over something Sydney Sweeney said, sold, promoted, or performed?... Read More

In 2020, as the pandemic gripped the world, Cord Jefferson, Max Read, Emma Carmichael and Leah Beckmann spent their days in a Zoom writers... Read More

Unlike political scientists and social critics, who can diagnose the illnesses of a specific body politic without speculating on the best... Read More

Christopher Nolan’s Trojan Horse isn’t a towering colossus looming over the coast of Troy. It’s sinking. Half-submerged, it... Read More

Earlier this year, after a tumultuous period serving as the former second-in-command at the FBI, Dan Bongino went back to what he is perhaps... Read More

LeBron’s Lakers Run Was Obviously a Success Read More

In the movies, nobody is better at being alone than Tony Leung. In 1994’s Chungking Express, the film that made him a global arthouse... Read More

In November 2014, less than a year into his tenure as NBA commissioner, Adam Silver quietly staked his claim to the most consequential... Read More

Karl Urban walks into the room like a goddamn movie star. Meticulously coiffed hair, a brown-green henley that highlights his shoulders,... Read More

I used to have an athlete’s intimacy with my own body. I could make it do almost anything I wanted: leap to the ceiling, stretch like... Read More

My wife gave birth to our son, Theodore, in 2023. He was delivered a few days after his due date, and in the week leading to his birth much... Read More

Harvey Mansfield is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Government at Harvard University. Still teaching at the age of 94, he has just... Read More

You might think that the world of children’s books is a warm and cozy place. You might think that people in the industry wish, by means... Read More

This past November, I headed to the National Book Award gala, after another day of bad news. I cannot even recall what calamity had just... Read More

William H. Gass’s 1995 novel The Tunnel, recently reprinted by Dalkey Archive Press, is not a comfortable book. Its narrator, the... Read More

Like it or not, generative AI is becoming increasingly embedded in the process of seeking information, sharing ideas, and producing images.... Read More

In systems engineering, the concept of graceful degradation describes how a well-designed system behaves when components fail — like... Read More