RealClearBooks - Book News, Book Reviews, Publishing Industry Aggregator

A reflection on an inspired work of folk art in rural East Tennessee… The house of God sits at the end of an old dirt road lined with... Read More

Reading about other writers is my guiltiest and least productive pleasure. The fugitive bolt of recognition is exactly what I’m... Read More

The Perception I spent a long career at the CIA but I rarely write about it. The myth is too pervasive and exciting, so that anything I said... Read More

{Cough, clears throat}. Chapter one. It’s 1991 in Manhattan. Cue a Gershwin piano trill, followed by sirens; open on an old lady... Read More

People can be rude about my being from Ohio. I don’t understand why. It is a relatively dense swing state where the demographics around... Read More

This is the last part of a series which I began in 2024. The first two parts bore the somewhat bombastic heading “Why I... Read More

Robert Duvall, one of Hollywood’s most versatile and admired actors, has died at the age of ninety-five. He played any number of iconic... Read More

Risk 4. The Advice Fallacy: A veritable cognitive bias club sandwich There’s a particular kind of cognitive and rhetorical... Read More

In one of his loveliest and most idealistic sonnets, Shakespeare writes, Love is not love Which alters... Read More

Last Friday, onstage at a major AI summit in India, Sam Altman wanted to address what he called an “unfair” criticism. The OpenAI... Read More

The disappointing truth is that most lives are failures from the general human standpoint. Many of us rarely move from wish to purpose. Those... Read More

Every great invention is also a question. Consider the telescope. It certainly has practical applications—it can help you scope out a... Read More

Shelly Romero has early memories of going to her local supermarket and picking pulp fiction off the shelves. “We were very working... Read More

Every crop we consume came from a wild ancestor. Through breeding, people selected for bigger grains, juicier fruit, more branches, or... Read More

In late 18th-century Europe, you knew trouble was brewing when your son started wearing yellow pants. This was a sign he might be suffering... Read More

A decade after the untimely death of Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016, veteran journalist James Rosen has released the second volume of his... Read More

The Cotillion Room in The Pierre hotel has wall panels painted with pale green laurel wreaths, plush carpet patterned with grey-blue... Read More

On January 30, 2026, the Department of Education (ED) released its proposed rule defining what constitutes a “professional... Read More

Don DeLillo once remarked, with regard to twentieth-century American fiction, that it is “as though Hemingway died one day and Pynchon... Read More

Gord Magill is angry. The veteran trucker followed in the occupational footsteps of his father and grandfather, but they would barely... Read More

Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain, the story of an unnamed narrator undergoing a rare, sudden and life-threatening medical crisis, was... Read More

Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party had a scary Halloween last year. On October 31, 2025, a gunmetal-colored, bullet-shaped object... Read More

The right side of Twitter spent the morning after Super Bowl LX trying very hard not to say something obvious. Bad Bunny had just... Read More

Standing beside a shelf of bestsellers with some friends at McNally Jackson Seaport in downtown Manhattan, Meg Charlton, a writer, recalled... Read More

“Meet him at the lobby entrance at 1 p.m. You’ll recognize him :)” That’s the only instruction. At 1 p.m., Benicio... Read More

When his mother decides he’s too gifted for public school and says she’ll be homeschooling him for fifth grade, Stefan Block has... Read More

It’s hard for the Winter Olympics to compete with the Summer Games. Dozens of skiing and skating variations can’t really compare... Read More

In our wayward teenage years, we played a game known colloquially as Council Estate Roulette. The ancients called it coitus interruptus.... Read More

For twenty-six years, CBS’s Survivor has positioned itself as a grand experiment in traditional American meritocracy. Any... Read More

There’s nothing more villainous, no figure more reviled, than a bad mother. This is what we’ve been told time and again, in... Read More

Time marches on, but literary discourse is eternal. The last week has seen a revival of the “should aspiring fiction writers actually... Read More

“WHAT IS THAT? What’s down there?” I overheard an electrical technician say this as he peered into the dark space beneath... Read More