RealClearBooks - Book News, Book Reviews, Publishing Industry Aggregator

Macklin Celebrini’s Range Rover is missing. The 20-year-old Vancouver-born hockey phenom—a center on the San Jose Sharks—is... Read More

The incidents that more than anything else fixed the image of rogue AIs in the public mind — the Anthropic model that blackmailed an... Read More

For more than a thousand years, the intellectual core of the Western world was held captive by a single institution: the medieval Catholic... Read More

In 2020, the entertainment mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg brought to life an idea that must have seemed — in the flash of its conception... Read More

I always thought that the reason museums west of the Mississippi and inland from California didn’t have top Old Masters and... Read More

ThREE MEN ARE OUT RAFTING on the Colorado River together: an activist, a government servant, and a journalist. This is not a setup for a... Read More

In my final year as an undergraduate at Trinity College Dublin in 2007, a friend signed me up to a new social network. She filled out all the... Read More

For a period during the first half of this decade – ecstatic and life-affirming and over all too soon – I found myself living... Read More

Because I’m going to be quite critical of Theo Baker’s How to Rule the World, it feels only right to start with three pieces of... Read More

The tomb is in the crypt, beneath two vast churches stacked one on top of the other, beneath Giotto, beneath Cimabue, beneath an acre of... Read More

Higher education today is reeling from multiple crises. From the incursion of artificial intelligence into the classroom, to the crackdown on... Read More

Whenever I find myself in London, the first thing I do is go to the London Review Bookshop, down the street from the British Museum in... Read More

During the rare, vanishing cool days this summer, I woke up early and sat by the open window and read novels—Muñoz Molina,... Read More

CRITICS, AT LEAST IN THE DALLAS AREA where I live, were asked to promise not to reveal plot points about Digger on social media or in their... Read More

Americans have a lot of misconceptions about the rich. This becomes clear when you read The Everywhere Millionaire by Owen Zidar and Eric... Read More

Victor Davis Hanson calls Donald Trump’s experience between January 2021 and January 2025 the greatest comeback in American political... Read More

Late in Ben Lerner's 2014 novel 10:04, a Lerner-like professor of poetry meets with a graduate student who he suspects is having a mental... Read More

I believe this is a Northern Water Snake, at any rate very young, the thickness of my ring finger. He wants to be a big snake. Like the young... Read More

Well Walk and the last dregs of a tireless November. John had given over his mornings, his afternoons, what was left of his evenings, to the... Read More

I didn’t really register the now-ubiquitous phrase Weird Girl Lit until this spring, when Kate Folk, author of Sky Daddy, mentioned it... Read More

Matthew Gasda’s Stranger Beauty opens with M, a former playwright in New York City, waking up from a nap while his young daughter Ruby... Read More

“For years rambling men had sheltered in the trees along the roadways,” Grace Krilanovich writes toward the end of her sly and... Read More

The title of Guillermo Stitch’s last novel was Lake of Urine. His latest is The Coast of Everything. Clearly the man is a fan of... Read More

This week I’m excited to be chatting with Adam Wilson, an old friend whose hilarious and heartfelt new novel Fail Sons is out in stores... Read More

To say it’s no Demon Copperhead hardly seems fair. But that’s the unenviable starting point for Barbara Kingsolver’s new... Read More

“A good coat of paint can hide a multitude of sins,” a time-tested adage maintains. Unless that paint happens to be... Read More

It was Francis Bacon, the statesman and theorist of science, whose Essayes, published in 1597, introduced the concept into English prose.... Read More

The tech-rationalist phenomenon “SlutCon” caused quite a stir online, perhaps predictably. SlutCon was a multi-day retreat and... Read More

A philosophical book on Agatha Christie may seem slightly odd at first: wasn’t she just a great novelist who wrote mysteries? Read More

Cassandra may have been beautiful — Homer described her as the fairest of Trojan king Priam’s daughters — but we know her... Read More

There are two kinds of love of country, Alexis de Tocqueville observed in Democracy in America. The first is a “sort of patriotic... Read More

Most Americans think of mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria, yellow fever, and dengue as problems that affect people in other countries,... Read More

When I was a young man and read a lot about philosophy I came across Stephen Jay Gould’s concept of “non-overlapping... Read More

I always feel better about my day when it starts with a smoothie instead of a breakfast sandwich. When it comes to peak writing mode, some... Read More

For young white American men, building a successful career in fiction has become something like trying to kick water uphill.  Read More

Giles Martin, son of the Beatles’ celebrated producer, George Martin, has remixed Rubber Soul. The result, which follows similar work... Read More

When reading the news, you may occasionally be bemused by the flip-flopping science and health stories: one week you’re told coffee is... Read More