RealClearBooks - Book News, Book Reviews, Publishing Industry Aggregator

Ralph Ellison​ described Invisible Man as an account of his narrator’s movement from ‘purpose to passion to perception’,... Read More

“Heteronormativity is just so broken,” declares Alex (Glori Dei Filippone), a Gender Studies master’s student at Columbia,... Read More

Winnie-the-Pooh turns 100 today. Actually, that’s not quite true. Yes, A.A. Milne’s beloved book Winnie-the-Pooh, with equally... Read More

It’s time to dig up the truth: Is Digger really all that bad? The Tom Cruise–starring doomsday satire film “will go down in... Read More

The latest solution to our romantic malaise appears to be AI matchmakers. That’s right; if you’re feeling unlucky in love, you... Read More

Ialways enjoy visiting the Portland Museum of Art (PMA) in Maine, in good and not-so-good times, and the museum is experiencing both. Its... Read More

“Hello Professor Snigdha Poonam,” the email began. I read that again. Nobody has ever called me “professor” for the... Read More

Politicians are often accused of playing toy soldiers. Rarely, however, do they actually do it. The Wargame is an exception. Sky TV’s... Read More

For Guitarricadelafuente and Miguel Bernardeau, the romance that fuels “La Bola Negra” wasn’t the challenge. “It... Read More

The American system of government, President Eisenhower once said, “has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious... Read More

The Internet was built by men for men, most especially by white men for white men, and there’s a way in which, in the past, you could... Read More

Martin Scorsese’s “The Departed” turned 20 this month. There’s plenty that could be said about the 2006 film as it... Read More

Writers find inspiration for their fiction almost anywhere. Toni Morrison was sparked to write Beloved when, while working as an editor on... Read More

MY WIFE AND I use a budgeting app to track our Amazon orders. Last week, we compared three of them. October 18, 2021: a five-pound tub of... Read More

When I told a couple of twenty-somethings I was writing a short article about young people not reading books, their immediate response was:... Read More

Recently I heard what must be the worst song of the year—a jaunty little number from the world’s biggest musician, and possibly... Read More

It’s been a banger year for books. Cast your mind, and remember that this was the same year that Belle Burden’s Strangers became... Read More

You can’t be cruel to a toaster; inanimate objects don’t feel pain. You can’t be cruel to a computer program, either, even... Read More

That liberal democracy is in a state of terminal decline I take to be beyond dispute. Like Alice in the rabbit hole, those of us who dwell in... Read More

Over the past few years, I’ve begun to think a lot about generational differences. I know this is annoying, because people (mostly... Read More

After five years in Washington, D.C., I’m returning to the foothills of the southern Adirondacks in New York. It’s the place I... Read More

Reflecting on the historic federal Welfare Reform Act three decades after its signing, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich recently... Read More

There are two books before me, which, if I mistake not, will mark an epoch,” wrote W. E. B. Du Bois in The Crisis magazine in 1924. One... Read More

Sometimes culture moves in a way that blindsides me. For instance, I actually saw the now INFAMOUS Shane Gillis SNL monologue before it... Read More

Word had reached me early. Grimes, the impish thirty-eight-year-old Canadian musician and mother to three of Elon Musk’s fourteen... Read More

I’ve always been a wannabe Luddite. Despite my dependence on—and sometimes addiction to—technology, I’ve never shaken... Read More

In 1932, the poet John Cornford — then a 16-year-old schoolboy — sent samples of his work to W.H. Auden.  Read More

In the opening of Music Against the Night, Yiyun Li claims, “If someone were to write John Field’s biography, it would be a... Read More

NATHAN FIELDER HAS MADE A CAREER out of examining the gap between reality and perception, particularly in the context of what we see... Read More

The name Nokia comes from an ancient manor house sitting at the confluence of two rivers near the city of Tampere in western Finland —... Read More

Books about successful people often make success sound rather unappealing. Education should be intense and rigorous, focused on driving up IQ... Read More

The 77,303,568 people who voted for Donald Trump in 2024 were apparently unfazed by the more than 30,000 false or misleading statements he... Read More

There’s an oft quoted statistic in the book world that millions of new books are published each year (the link says 4.2 million in... Read More

It’s been a brutal year for many in the journalism profession, with newsrooms across the nation announcing layoffs and many talented... Read More

Before there was Nathan Fielder, there was Tom McCarthy. Fielder’s HBO series The Rehearsal recreates mundane situations in compulsive... Read More

Seven million people watched To Catch a Predator on average during the show’s mid-aughts run as part of NBC’s newsmagazine... Read More

My views on AI have changed.  Read More