RealClearBooks - Book News, Book Reviews, Publishing Industry Aggregator

I first came across Jim Shepard’s work in County Highway last year, a story titled “The Sons of Liberty.” I’ve never... Read More

The small city, I’ve always believed, is most conducive to feeling the intensity of a championship run. Take a city with less than one... Read More

It was a typically balmy April evening, and Braden Peters, age twenty, had fainted again. Music pulsated faintly over the speakers of the... Read More

Over the years, writers from around the world have tried their hands at using soccer as a backdrop for memorable fiction. Tonally speaking,... Read More

NAPOLEON’S FAVORITE BOOK of poetry was a fraud. He carried it through the Italian campaigns and still had it with him, years later, in... Read More

Last week I wrote about the art of the American Revolution, mostly John Trumbull’s. The best of it is at the art gallery at Yale, then... Read More

The night before my father drove three hours to Southern Illinois to do battle with a demon bird, he handed me a three-ring binder. Inside... Read More

It’s World Cup time again, and Americans from Bangor to Batavia don’t even bother to stifle their quadrennial yawns, while more... Read More

n December, the New York Times published a feature titled “Should You Be Able to Ask a Doctor to Help You Die?” It included the... Read More

Terry “Hulk Hogan” Bollea embodied professional wrestling at its best and at its worst. He could thrill, inspire and amuse... Read More

There are precious few “ambiguous monument[s]” still standing. Many periodicals like Lionel Trilling’s beloved Partisan... Read More

Ever since the COVID pandemic hit in 2020, I’ve been eager to read novels that explore what COVID was, and continues to be like. At the... Read More

The American Founding was an epic, earthshaking, history-making event that still reverberates through the ages. For close to half of our... Read More

There’s hardly a ruler in the world who would identify as fascist, but if you trust the mainstream media, you will assume fascism is on... Read More

Where were you in ’62?  Regardless of your answer to that question, author James Ellroy offers a more exciting alternative in his... Read More

A pair of articles about Columbus, Ohio were published last week that shed light on growing societal inequality in a “K-shaped”... Read More

Toni Morrison has lately been bestowed with a dubious distinction: the patron saint of cancel culture. Beyond her cutting remarks about... Read More

What if your favorite thing in the world was in the hands of a ghoul? Like the damsel in King Kong’s hand, the FIFA World Cup is a... Read More

When I was very young, maybe 5 years old, I enlisted in one of the great pastimes of American childhood: the town soccer league. Twice a... Read More

When you think about it, there really is no reason not to dress up and go out dancing. That’s why, on a Saturday afternoon in late... Read More

To live with plants, even if one lives alone, is to not truly live alone. Plants are living beings, with both a genesis and a death; for a... Read More

Freya India is worried about the girls. Girls®, to be more precise. “We have been transformed from people into products,” the... Read More

For those of us who like to think literacy is a form of liberation, there's a troubling counterpoint: Mein Kampf. Adolf Hitler wasn't... Read More

THERE WAS A TIME, not long ago, when Jalen Brunson questioned all the same things about himself that his critics did. His size, his... Read More

For H. W. Crocker III, the past may be a foreign country, but going there is much more fun if you eschew preparations, steal a jeep,... Read More

When Sydney Sweeney sat down to watch the finale of Euphoria, she was just as surprised as the rest of us. “What was interesting was we... Read More

“The permanent underworld of American public life,” wrote Christopher Hitchens, “has only ever been captured and distilled... Read More

It’s no secret that these are bad times for most Jews in the diaspora. Anti-Semitism across the West has reached a virulence not seen... Read More

Here’s what literature means to me, and why it appeals to me, roughly in order of priority: It’s ambitious. It’s a... Read More

Los Angeles is a city of ten million people, each of us rubbing our eyes, filtering our water, paying our parking tickets. Doing our daily... Read More

I’m deeply saddened—indeed, gutted—to learn about the tragic death of my dissertation advisor, Gordon S. Wood. Professor... Read More

Sebastian Mallaby, of the Council on Foreign Relations, has published a deeply researched account of the emergence, rise, and prospects of... Read More

What a time to try to commemorate this nation’s founding! Imperialism is back. Militarized federal agents have been massing in cities... Read More