RealClear Books

RealClearBooks (RCB) serves as a comprehensive resource for understanding U.S. domestic policy, particularly spotlighting the work of think tanks, associations, and foundations. The platform gathers articles and research, and also features original content. RCB is part of the RealClear Media Group (RCMG), which includes 15 different brands and websites catering to a wide range of interests and topics.

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Articles

The Wunderkind Novel, Two Decades Later

2 months ago | realclearbooks.com | Laura Miller

The heroine of Karen Russell’s new novel, The Antidote—her second—is a plucky teenage girl intent on excelling at a practice typically reserved for boys.
‘Love Hurts’ Review

Feb 7, 2025 | realclearbooks.com | Kyle Smith

Considering the matchup in this weekend’s Super Bowl, it’s a propitious moment to release a movie titled “Love Hurts.” Philadelphia Eagles fans fond of quarterback Jalen Hurts will nod vigorously in agreement. If only the movie displayed the skill set of the play caller. Instead, it’s a rookie effort, and it shows. Read Full Article »
The Big Finish

Feb 6, 2025 | realclearbooks.com | Laura Miller

“The worst is not. So long as we can say ‘This is the worst,’ ” go the lines from King Lear quoted in Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 novel Station Eleven. Any stories we tell about the end of the world will have to be fictional, since once the real thing occurs, no one will be around to describe it.
The 7 Most Important Athletes of 2024

Dec 24, 2024 | realclearbooks.com | Will Leitch

Measured by sheer number of viewers, this might have been the most popular sports year in American history. More people watched the Super Bowl than ever before; the World Series had its highest ratings in a decade; the Olympics drew nearly double the number of viewers the Tokyo Games did in 2021; women’s sports have grown so dramatically that, in basketball, women are getting better numbers than the men.
The Author in Evening

Oct 11, 2024 | realclearbooks.com | Laura Miller

Gay life, fine art, and the British class system have been mainstays of Alan Hollinghurst’s fiction since his dizzyingly explicit debut novel, 1988’s The Swimming-Pool Library. Hollinghurst’s earliest work fizzed with the energy of a newly acquired freedom to describe what gay men do together in a style many regard as the most elegant in contemporary English.
‘Why We Love Football’ Review

Oct 7, 2024 | realclearbooks.com | Will Leitch

‘The power of football is that it’s real,” writes Joe Posnanski in his book “Why We Love Football,” an intriguing, mostly inconsequential aside he uses to explain why there are more good TV shows and movies about baseball than about football. (The idea seems to be that football doesn’t work as fiction as well as baseball does.) Yet this ends up being the sort of vague thesis statement his book can’t quite muster up the energy to address. Read Full Article »
America’s Last Great Political Novel

Aug 6, 2024 | realclearbooks.com | Kevin Mims

America has produced plenty of high-quality political novels. Few American mystery novelists have ever investigated a real-life murder, and few contemporary Western novelists have ever participated in a cattle drive. But plenty of political professionals—presidents, vice presidents, governors, senators, journalists, campaign managers, political appointees, government insiders—have written political novels, and many of them are very good.
Books Sold Here

Aug 5, 2024 | realclearbooks.com | Joseph Epstein

The bookshop is the pool-hall for nerds. For those of us who look upon books as near-sacred objects and the places where they are sold as temples of sorts, bookshops are places of pleasure, education, and camaraderie, and as such are indispensable to the good life. Read Full Article »
The Great Relearning of American Schools

Aug 1, 2024 | realclearbooks.com | Daniel Buck

At the start of the pandemic, many elite institutions went test optional, only to reverse course and again require the submission of SAT or ACT scores. It’s an eye-catching list: Brown, Dartmouth, Georgetown, Harvard, and many more. In a fit of anti-testing sentiments, they toppled a statue, but one by one they recognized their error and re-erected it. Read Full Article » Show comments Hide Comments Related Articles
Was 'Hillbilly Elegy' Ever Good?

Jul 18, 2024 | realclearbooks.com | Laura Miller

What I’ve always remembered most clearly from J.D. Vance’s bestselling memoir, 2016’s Hillbilly Elegy, is its scorching descriptions of the lies that the working-class rural white Americans he grew up among tell themselves. An account of his chaotic and often perilous upbringing among people with roots in Appalachia, and of his seemingly miraculous climb out of that morass and into Yale Law School, Vance’s book hit at the most opportune moment.