book review essay generator

Book Review Generator

Start generating book reviews for free below.

If you need help, please refer to the detailed step-by-step instructions entitled below.

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Generate book reviews in these simple steps.

Enter book title

Select language, tone and word count

Click on the Generate button

Introducing WriteCream’s Instant Book Review Generator : Crafting Book Reviews with a Single Click

Are you tired of struggling to write captivating book reviews that do justice to the authors’ hard work? Look no further! We bring you the Book Review Generator, the ultimate tool that will revolutionize your reviewing experience. These tools are intended to assist users in quickly creating book reviews without having to read the entire book.

How It Works:

This innovative tool is packed with incredible features designed to assist both avid readers and aspiring critics in crafting high-quality, compelling book reviews effortlessly. With the Book Review Generator, you can say goodbye to writer’s block and hello to insightful, professional reviews that will captivate your audience.

1. Input Your Topic: Provide the tool with the title and author of the book you want to review.

2. Click to Generate: With a single click, the generator springs into action, presenting you with a comprehensive book review.

3. Review and Refine: With a single click, the generator springs into action, presenting you with a comprehensive book review.

4. Download and Utilize: Use the generated book review for various purposes—sharing on book review websites, contributing to literary discussions, or even as a foundation for writing your own review.

Key Features:

– Instant Reviews: Generate book reviews in mere seconds, eliminating the need to spend hours crafting your thoughts and opinions.

– Comprehensive Insights: Access reviews that provide in-depth analysis of the book’s plot, characters, themes, writing style, and overall impact.

– Customization: Tailor the generated review to your liking. Add your unique perspective, opinions, or additional insights to make it truly your own.

– Diverse Genres: Explore reviews for books across various genres, from classic literature to contemporary fiction, non-fiction, and more.

– Enhanced Expressiveness: Use the generated reviews to jumpstart your own critique, helping you organize your thoughts and impressions effectively.

– Time Efficiency: Save valuable time and resources by instantly accessing well-structured reviews, enabling you to share your opinions or insights without the need for extensive reading and writing.

Revolutionize your reviewing experience with the Book Review Generator. Whether you’re a book blogger, a literature enthusiast, or simply looking to enhance your writing skills, this tool is your go-to companion. Start writing captivating reviews effortlessly and grab your readers’ attention like never before!

Create content in minutes, not weeks.

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Review Generator

Write about your review topic in one line..

Example: For computer institute or coaching centre

Unlike many other AI writer tools, WriterHand.com is completely free to use. There are no subscription fees or hidden costs, and you can use the tool as much as you want without any limitations.

Easy to Use

WriterHand.com has been designed with simplicity in mind. There's no need to sign up or create an account - you can simply start using the tool right away. The user-friendly design and simple controls make it easy for anyone.

Time Saving

With WriterHand.com, you can start writing with just one click. The tool generates content that is well-structured and coherent, which means you can spend less time editing and more time focusing on other tasks.

In the digital age, online reviews play a pivotal role in shaping consumer decisions. Whether it's purchasing a product, booking a hotel, or trying out a new restaurant, people heavily rely on reviews to inform their choices. This reliance has led to an increasing demand for review generation tools that can save time and effort while maintaining quality. WriterHand.com has taken the lead in this field with its groundbreaking 100% free Review Generator AI. In this article, we will explore the features and benefits of this powerful tool and how it can revolutionize the way writers and businesses generate authentic and persuasive reviews.

Generating Quality Reviews Effortlessly

WriterHand.com's Review Generator AI employs state-of-the-art natural language processing algorithms to produce high-quality reviews in a matter of seconds. The tool is designed to cater to the needs of both individual writers and businesses seeking to enhance their online presence. By simply inputting a few key details about a product, service, or experience, users can obtain well-crafted reviews that reflect a genuine customer's perspective.

Customization and Flexibility

One of the standout features of WriterHand.com's Review Generator AI is its versatility and customization options. The tool allows users to adjust the tone, length, and style of the generated reviews to align with their specific requirements. Whether you prefer a formal, professional tone for a corporate setting or a casual, friendly style for a restaurant review, the AI can adapt accordingly. This flexibility ensures that the generated reviews resonate with the target audience and accurately reflect the intended message.

Time-Saving Solution

Writing engaging and persuasive reviews can be a time-consuming task, especially when businesses or individuals have numerous products or services to showcase. WriterHand.com's Review Generator AI streamlines the process, enabling users to generate multiple reviews effortlessly and rapidly. This not only saves valuable time but also allows businesses to focus on core operations and writers to allocate their energy to other creative endeavors.

Authenticity and Credibility

One of the concerns with automated review generation is the potential lack of authenticity and credibility. However, WriterHand.com's Review Generator AI addresses this issue by producing reviews that feel genuine and believable. The AI model has been trained on vast amounts of real customer reviews, ensuring that the generated content reflects the nuances and language patterns found in authentic user feedback. This authenticity enhances the credibility of the reviews and boosts trust among potential customers.

Free of Charge

Perhaps the most compelling aspect of WriterHand.com's Review Generator AI is its accessibility. The tool is offered completely free of charge, allowing businesses and individuals to harness the power of AI-generated reviews without any financial burden. This democratization of review generation technology enables even small businesses and budding writers to compete in the digital marketplace on an equal footing with larger enterprises.

WriterHand.com's 100% free Review Generator AI is a game-changer in the field of review generation. With its ability to generate high-quality reviews effortlessly, its customization options, and its focus on authenticity and credibility, this tool is a valuable asset for writers and businesses alike. By saving time, amplifying online presence, and building trust among consumers, WriterHand.com's Review Generator AI has the potential to reshape the way we approach online reviews, benefiting both creators and consumers in the process.

Popular Writer Tools

Instant Book Review Generator

Generate professional book reviews in minutes with our powerful AI book review generator.

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Time-saving solution.

Create detailed book reviews quickly, saving valuable time for other tasks.

Professional Reviews

Produce professional-quality book reviews with our advanced AI technology.

Error-Free Content

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Boost Your Productivity with AI Writing Tools

Efficiency and accuracy.

AI writing tools are designed to enhance your writing experience by providing efficient and accurate suggestions. These tools utilize advanced algorithms to analyze your content and offer real-time feedback, helping you to identify and correct errors quickly. By using AI writing tools, you can streamline your writing process and ensure that your content is error-free.

Furthermore, these tools can help you improve the overall quality of your writing. With features such as grammar and style suggestions, you can elevate the standard of your content, making it more engaging and professional. The combination of efficiency and accuracy makes AI writing tools indispensable for anyone looking to enhance their writing skills.

Versatility and Convenience

One of the key benefits of AI writing tools is their versatility and convenience. Whether you are a student, professional writer, or content creator, these tools offer a wide range of functionalities to suit your specific needs. From generating book reviews to crafting compelling narratives, AI writing tools provide versatile solutions for various writing tasks.

Moreover, the convenience of accessing these tools online allows you to seamlessly integrate them into your writing workflow. You can harness the power of AI writing tools from anywhere, at any time, empowering you to create high-quality content on the go. The versatility and convenience offered by these tools make them an invaluable resource for writers across diverse domains.

Enhanced Creativity and Inspiration

AI writing tools not only aid in refining your writing but also stimulate creativity and inspiration. By generating insightful content suggestions and prompts, these tools can ignite fresh ideas and perspectives, fostering a more creative approach to writing. With features such as brainstorming assistance and creative prompts, AI writing tools serve as catalysts for unleashing your creative potential.

Additionally, the integration of AI technology in writing tools opens up new possibilities for exploring innovative writing styles and genres. Through AI-generated prompts and recommendations, writers can experiment with diverse storytelling techniques, expanding their creative horizons. The enhanced creativity and inspiration facilitated by AI writing tools offer writers a gateway to explore uncharted territories in their writing journey.

Maximizing Your Writing Potential with the Best AI Tools

Utilize advanced features.

When leveraging the best AI writing tools, make sure to explore and utilize their advanced features to enhance your writing. Features such as sentiment analysis, tone adjustment, and plagiarism checks can significantly elevate the quality of your content. By harnessing these advanced capabilities, you can refine your writing and ensure that it resonates with your target audience.

Additionally, the incorporation of AI-powered content generation and outline structuring can streamline the writing process, allowing you to craft well-organized and engaging narratives effortlessly. Embracing the advanced features of AI writing tools empowers you to maximize your writing potential and produce compelling content.

Embrace Collaborative Writing

Another valuable tip when using the best AI tools for writing is to embrace collaborative writing features. Many AI writing tools offer collaborative functionalities that enable seamless teamwork and content collaboration. By leveraging these features, writers can engage in collective brainstorming, content refinement, and real-time collaboration, fostering a synergistic writing environment.

Furthermore, the ability to receive instant feedback and suggestions from peers or collaborators enhances the iterative process of refining your content. Embracing collaborative writing through AI tools not only fosters a sense of community but also enriches the overall quality of the written work through diverse perspectives and inputs.

Harness Customization Capabilities

Optimizing the best AI writing tools involves harnessing their customization capabilities to tailor the writing experience according to your preferences. Customizable features such as personalized writing style adjustments, industry-specific templates, and audience targeting tools enable you to craft content that aligns with your unique voice and resonates with your intended audience.

Moreover, the ability to create custom writing prompts and templates empowers writers to address specific writing challenges and explore niche topics with ease. By harnessing the customization capabilities of AI writing tools, you can elevate the relevance and impact of your content, ensuring that it effectively communicates your message to the desired audience.

Stay Updated with AI Innovations

As the landscape of AI writing tools continues to evolve, it is essential to stay updated with the latest innovations and advancements in the field. Keeping abreast of new features, updates, and emerging AI writing trends enables you to leverage cutting-edge functionalities and enhancements that can revolutionize your writing process.

Additionally, staying informed about AI innovations allows you to adapt and integrate new tools and techniques into your writing repertoire, staying ahead of the curve in the dynamic realm of AI-powered writing. By staying updated with AI innovations, you can harness the full potential of these tools and stay at the forefront of innovative writing practices.

Balance AI Assistance with Human Creativity

While leveraging the best AI tools for writing, it is crucial to strike a balance between AI assistance and human creativity. While AI writing tools offer invaluable support in refining and enhancing content, they are most impactful when harmonized with human creativity and storytelling prowess. Embracing the synergy between AI assistance and human creativity fosters a holistic approach to writing.

Moreover, integrating human creativity with AI-generated insights results in a harmonious blend of innovation and authenticity, allowing writers to infuse their unique voice and perspective into the content. By striking a balance between AI assistance and human creativity, writers can harness the full potential of AI writing tools while preserving the artistry and individuality of their craft.

How to use Article Generator

Choose a template.

Select the necessary template from the template gallery.

Provide more details

Fill out the carefully selected inputs to create the best quality of output content.

Enjoy the results

Copy, save for later, rate the output or hit regenerate button.

Unleashing Creativity: AI Writing Tools in Action

Discover how AI writing tools can spark creativity and provide valuable insights for crafting compelling book reviews. Explore the potential of these tools through the following examples.

Create a captivating book review that encapsulates the essence of the narrative while offering unique insights and engaging perspectives to enthrall potential readers.

Unraveling the captivating tapestry of 'The Nightingale' by Kristin Hannah, this book review transcends conventional summaries to delve into the profound emotional resonance embedded within the narrative. Through the immersive exploration of the characters' journeys and the poignant portrayal of resilience amidst adversity, this review offers a compelling glimpse into the intricacies of human experience.

Additionally, the review delves into the thematic depth of the narrative, shedding light on the evocative depiction of wartime turmoil and the enduring power of hope. By intertwining personal reflections with thought-provoking analysis, the review invites readers into an enriching literary discourse that transcends mere critique, fostering a profound connection with the essence of the story.

Furthermore, the review encapsulates the author's masterful storytelling prowess, unraveling the nuances of narrative craftsmanship and character development. It weaves together eloquent prose and insightful commentary, offering a comprehensive portrayal of the narrative's impact while evoking a sense of anticipation and intrigue in potential readers.

The utilization of AI writing tools in crafting this review has facilitated the seamless integration of compelling insights and captivating narratives, elevating the review into an immersive literary experience. By harnessing AI-generated prompts and content suggestions, the review has transcended traditional boundaries, offering a testament to the symbiotic relationship between human creativity and AI-powered writing tools.

Moreover, the review exemplifies the synergy between AI assistance and human creativity, showcasing the transformative potential of AI writing tools in inspiring captivating and evocative content. By embracing the capabilities of AI writing tools, this review stands as a testament to the dynamic fusion of AI-powered insights and human storytelling prowess, exemplifying the boundless possibilities of AI-driven creativity in the realm of book reviews.

In conclusion, the creation of this book review serves as a testament to the capacity of AI writing tools to ignite creativity, infuse depth into narratives, and inspire captivating literary discourse. Through the seamless fusion of AI-generated prompts and human creativity, this review encapsulates the transformative potential of AI writing tools in shaping immersive and engaging content that resonates with readers on a profound level.

Craft an in-depth narrative analysis that delves into the thematic intricacies and character dynamics of a compelling literary work, offering profound insights and thought-provoking interpretations.

Embarking on a profound journey into the thematic tapestry of 'The Great Gatsby' by F. Scott Fitzgerald, this narrative analysis transcends traditional critiques to unravel the multifaceted layers of societal commentary and existential introspection woven within the narrative. Through an exploration of the enigmatic characters and the evocative portrayal of the Jazz Age, this analysis offers a compelling examination of human aspirations and disillusionment.

Furthermore, the analysis delves into the symbolic significance of the green light, unraveling its profound implications on the characters' pursuits and desires. It navigates the intricate web of symbolism and thematic resonance, offering readers a nuanced understanding of the narrative's underlying motifs and allegorical representations.

Moreover, the analysis delves into the author's narrative craftsmanship, illuminating the interplay of lyrical prose and intricate storytelling techniques that underpin the enduring allure of 'The Great Gatsby.' By intertwining literary exploration with introspective reflection, the analysis invites readers into a captivating discourse that transcends surface-level critique, fostering a profound appreciation for the narrative's enduring relevance.

The integration of AI writing tools in crafting this analysis has facilitated the seamless synthesis of insightful interpretations and evocative narratives, elevating the analysis into a transformative literary exploration. By harnessing AI-generated prompts and content suggestions, the analysis has transcended traditional boundaries, offering a testament to the symbiotic relationship between human creativity and AI-powered writing tools.

In conclusion, this narrative analysis serves as a testament to the transformative potential of AI writing tools in inspiring profound literary explorations and insightful interpretations. Through the harmonious integration of AI-powered insights and human storytelling prowess, this analysis exemplifies the boundless possibilities of AI-driven creativity in the realm of narrative analysis, shaping immersive and thought-provoking content that resonates with readers on a profound level.

Frequently Asked Questions

How can i use ai writing tools for generating book reviews, are there specific ai tools for writing book reviews, what are the benefits of using ai writing tools for book review generation, can ai-powered writing tools improve the quality of book reviews, how do ai writing tools assist authors in creating book reviews, can ai writing tools be used to enhance book review writing, join 1,000,000+ creators and professionals from trusted companies by choosing us, .css-1d7fhal{margin:0;font-family:"roboto","helvetica","arial",sans-serif;font-weight:400;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.5;letter-spacing:0.00938em;max-width:700px;}@media (min-width:0px){.css-1d7fhal{font-size:24px;font-weight:600;line-height:32px;font-family:'__inter_6eddd9','__inter_fallback_6eddd9';}}@media (min-width:744px){.css-1d7fhal{font-size:45px;font-weight:600;line-height:52px;font-family:'__inter_6eddd9','__inter_fallback_6eddd9';}} have a task that has no tool our chat knows how to do it.

Paraphrase Tool

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Paraphrase variations in 18 writing modes.

Your words and thoughts matter, and we’ve designed our paraphrase tool to ensure find the best words to match your expression. Just paste or start writing your text in our input box above, and our best in class AI will help you to generate the best paraphrases from your original writing.

Write 10x faster with keywords in Compose mode

Who has time for writer’s block? Our Composer can help you write 10x faster by enabling you to create paragraphs from keywords instantly for articles, cover letters, essays, and more than 500 other types of writing in 100+ Languages. This way you can focus more on your final work rather than your first draft.

Check plagiarism in 50+ languages

None of us wants to accidentally plagiarize, especially when we spend so much time getting our ideas on paper and refining them. Be sure that your text is unique and 100% FREE of plagiarism by using our plagiarism checker for 50+ languages.

Paraphrase Tool uses state-of-the-art AI to paraphrase and compose in more than 100+ languages

Paraphrase Tool uses state-of-the-art AI to produce variations of your text in more than 100+ languages for each of the eighteen (12 free and 6 premium) styles that we offer. By doing this, we are able to offer more value and variety than any other service.

Billed every month

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About Paraphrase Tool

Getting your wording just right.

Paraphrasing is a natural part of the writing process as it helps you clarify your thinking and suit your words to your audience. Using a Paraphrase Tool helps structure and streamline this work, and our paraphrase tool offers 20 modes, many of them free, for accomplishing just this. The 20 modes we offer are diverse, including a summarize tool, a free grammar checker, a mode to simplify text, and a sentence shortener. There are sentence rephrasers and paraphrase rephrase tools, and we pride ourselves on having both, since our reword generator accounts for context at both the sentence and paragraph levels.

When you google paraphrase you will get a variety of results, from a free Paraphrase Tool , to an article spinner, to a general phrase tool, and it can be hard to determine which of these rephrase tools will best help you complete your work. If you simply need to get a word rephrase, that is, reword only small elements within the sentence, many tools will suffice, but there is the risk that you end up with a tool that does not consider context and produces very awkward and ungrammatical sentences. Rephrasing is very much an art, and we’ve built our paraphrase bot to produce the most correct results in 20 modes in over 100 languages, making it the best paraphrasing tool at an exceptionally low cost. So whether you need to paraphrase deutsch, paraphrase greek, or paraphrase bahasa melayu, the next time you think, I need something to paraphrase this for me, you’ll know where to turn.

From keywords to paragraphs

Generating paragraphs with unique ideas can be challenging, and too often writers get stuck at this stage of the writing process. With our paragraph tool, you can enter keywords and let our AI generate paragraphs for you, so that you can have something to work with, refine the output, and become more engaged in your writing.

A paragraph generator creates links between your ideas, such that the output is sensible, unique, and stimulating, very close to what you would expect a thoughtful human paragraph writer to produce.

Paragraph makers are nice, but what about a short story generator? Because our AI is generalized, it serves a story generator, an essay generator, a poem generator, and much more. To generate compelling stories, you should provide the story generator with useful keywords from which it can develop plot elements, including characters, setting details, and any situational information. To generate reasonably good essays, you should likewise provide the essay maker with details around argumentative positions and any other pertinent ideas. If you more specifically want an introduction paragraph generator or conclusion paragraph generator, you can provide starter text and keywords that will best enable our essay creator to produce them.

You may well ask, “is this essay generator free?” Everything on this site is free within a 3-day trial, so you can test and develop confidence in our products. You may also be wondering where this is an essay automatic writer or if it will take a while to get results. All results appear within a matter of seconds, so you can move through your work as quickly as possible.

You may have professional needs for creating paragraphs as well, such as those needed for cover letter. Most of the time a cover letter template includes information that is not relevant to you; by using your own keywords, we can produce cover letter examples that are relevant to your use case and often require very little editing. By using this service, you can also learn how to write a cover letter and achieve the cover letter format you need.

Plagiarism checker free

Like everything else on our site, you can check plagiarism free within a trial, which is a great opportunity for those who want to check a paper for plagiarism without committing to paying before they see results. This free plagiarism checker is great for students and clearly indicates how to check for plagiarism by highlighting areas of similarity between the two texts. Just to be sure you are not accidentally plagiarizing, be sure to check all of your paraphrases as well.

7 Superb AI Tools To Write Book Reviews (Free & Paid)

Ai tools to write book reviews.

With advanced AI Language Models People are exploring new creative horizons. AI tools are being used in many facets of education and the output is quite astounding. In the context of reviewing books, AI tools are making a big difference.

They assist us in analyzing and comprehending books more effectively.

In this blog post, we will take a closer look at these AI tools for book reviews and find out which AI tools really do help.

Can ai write book reviews?

AI-powered algorithms and natural language processing (NLP) models like ChatGPT can generate book reviews by analyzing the content of the book and providing insights and opinions.  It can carry out the following tasks quite efficiently

• Summarizing the Book
• Analyzing Themes and Literary Elements
• Generating Opinions based on patterns and data from other reviews
• Comparing to Similar Works in the same genre or by the same author
• Generating Sample Quotes from the book to illustrate key points or the author’s writing style.

However, it’s important to note that AI-generated book reviews may lack the human touch, personal perspective, and emotional depth that human reviewers can provide. While AI can be a helpful tool for generating initial drafts of book reviews or providing objective analysis, it’s often valuable to have human reviewers add their own insights, emotions, and personal experiences to create more engaging and relatable reviews.

Best Ai book review generators

Texta streamlines all parts of content creation, helping users effortlessly generate high-quality written content including reviews for books. Unlike ChatGPT whose database is limited to 2021 Textra works on the Latest Language Models so you can get reviews for the latest books

The best part is Textra supports multiple languages so you can generate book reviews using AI for books in other languages as well.

Texta a revolutionary AI tool that streamlines your content creation process and boosts your online presence. With this powerful tool, you can effortlessly generate high-quality content for various purposes, from blog posts to digital ad copy and beyond. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to supercharge your content creation process and elevate your online presence.

AI Writing Assistant| AI SEO Write| AI Copy Write | AI Email/ Letter | AI Social Content

Key Features

Sudowrite is a tool specifically designed to deal with book writing. It has a novel-centric algorithms so it understands the nuances of literature.

Sudowrite adapts to your language preferences and provides access to a rich resource library, supporting your literary endeavors with precision and creativity. Though not specifically designed for book reviews it does a pretty good job in this regard.

Sudowrite is a cutting-edge AI writing tool tailored for novelists, offering an exceptional user experience. Crafted by writers, for writers, it boasts a clean, intuitive interface and powerful features to enhance your novel-writing journey.

Elevate your novel-writing game with Sudowrite—an AI assistant that empowers writers to craft engaging stories effortlessly. Seamlessly accelerate your writing process with AI-powered keyword recommendations. Experience specialized algorithms designed to support novel creation with accuracy and precision.

AI Written Content Writer | AI Essay Writer| AI Blog Writer| AI Story Writer

Free (No Free Plan)

Jasper is AI platform which has numerous tools for writing content including a dedicated Book Review AI Tool. It excels in repackaging content into various formats, tones, and languages.

Unlike generic AI tools, Jasper can be customized and personalized giving it a unique tone which reflects you. This adaptability makes it a powerful tool for writing content including book reviews.

Jasper is an on-brand AI platform for businesses. It helps creators use generative AI to break through writer’s block, create original imagery, and repackage content into different formats, tones and languages. Unlike most AI tools which are tied to individual tools and can produce pretty generic outputs, Jasper can be trained on your brand and called up on any platform you use from email to social media to your website.

AI Content Generator | AI Art Generator| AI Writing Tools & more…

No Free Version however you can try it for free

Different Price Plans for Business, Teams & Creators. Basic Plan  Includes

Free Ai book review Writer

Writesonic is an excellent AI tool for writing book reviews, powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4, it excels in generating written content for numerous uses.

The free version is has sufficient word capacity to generate a few book reviews so you might not require the paid version. so whether you need to summarize a novel’s essence or create compelling reviews, Writesonic can be a great option .

Writesonic provides a complete writing solution. Write SEO optimized marketing copy for blogs, essays, Facebook ads, Google Ads, Quora answers, and sales emails to increase clicks, conversions, and sales. It runs on the Open AI Language Model ChatGPT-4 and the writing is great. However it is suited more for content at scale

AI Article & Blog Writer | Paraphrasing Tool |Article Summarizer | AI Copywriting  |Landing Pages | Ads Writer

Paid Plan (Individual & Business)

ChatPDF allows users to engage with PDF documents in a conversational manner, making it ideal for comprehending research papers, academic articles, and books.

With features such as AI summarization and PDF reading, ChatPDF simplifies the process of extracting key insights from books. It also supports multiple languages making it a valuable asset for book reviews if you have the book in the PDF form.

ChatPDF has emerged as a game-changer for students, researchers, and professionals, this AI tool enables users to interact with PDF documents as if they were engaging in a conversation. With a user-friendly interface, it simplifies the process of comprehending research papers, journal articles, legal contracts, financial reports, and manuals, thus making it a versatile tool for multiple sectors.

AI Summarizer| AI PDF Reader| AI Academic Writer

ChatGPT has some limitation when it comes to book reviews beyond 2021 however for popular books before 2021 I have found it to be quite accurate. With a little bit of human editing and right prompt the output can be extremely good.

Joe Daniels

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How to Write a Book Review: A Comprehensive Tutorial With Examples

You don’t need to be a literary expert to craft captivating book reviews. With one in every three readers selecting books based on insightful reviews, your opinions can guide fellow bibliophiles toward their next literary adventure.

Learning how to write a book review will not only help you excel at your assigned tasks, but you’ll also contribute valuable insights to the book-loving community and turn your passion into a professional pursuit.

In this comprehensive guide,  PaperPerk  will walk you through a few simple steps to master the art of writing book reviews so you can confidently embark on this rewarding journey.

What is a Book Review?

A book review is a critical evaluation of a book, offering insights into its content, quality, and impact. It helps readers make informed decisions about whether to read the book.

Writing a book review as an assignment benefits students in multiple ways. Firstly, it teaches them how to write a book review by developing their analytical skills as they evaluate the content, themes, and writing style .

Secondly, it enhances their ability to express opinions and provide constructive criticism. Additionally, book review assignments expose students to various publications and genres, broadening their knowledge.

Furthermore, these tasks foster essential skills for academic success, like critical thinking and the ability to synthesize information. By now, we’re sure you want to learn how to write a book review, so let’s look at the book review template first.

Table of Contents

Book Review Template

How to write a book review- a step by step guide.

Check out these 5 straightforward steps for composing the best book review.

Step 1: Planning Your Book Review – The Art of Getting Started

You’ve decided to take the plunge and share your thoughts on a book that has captivated (or perhaps disappointed) you. Before you start book reviewing, let’s take a step back and plan your approach. Since knowing how to write a book review that’s both informative and engaging is an art in itself.

Choosing Your Literature

First things first, pick the book you want to review. This might seem like a no-brainer, but selecting a book that genuinely interests you will make the review process more enjoyable and your insights more authentic.

Crafting the Master Plan

Next, create an  outline  that covers all the essential points you want to discuss in your review. This will serve as the roadmap for your writing journey.

The Devil is in the Details

As you read, note any information that stands out, whether it overwhelms, underwhelms, or simply intrigues you. Pay attention to:

• The characters and their development
• The plot and its intricacies
• Any themes, symbols, or motifs you find noteworthy

Remember to reserve a body paragraph for each point you want to discuss.

The Key Questions to Ponder

When planning your book review, consider the following questions:

• What’s the plot (if any)? Understanding the driving force behind the book will help you craft a more effective review.
• Is the plot interesting? Did the book hold your attention and keep you turning the pages?
• Are the writing techniques effective? Does the author’s style captivate you, making you want to read (or reread) the text?
• Are the characters or the information believable? Do the characters/plot/information feel real, and can you relate to them?
• Would you recommend the book to anyone? Consider if the book is worthy of being recommended, whether to impress someone or to support a point in a literature class.
• What could improve? Always keep an eye out for areas that could be improved. Providing constructive criticism can enhance the quality of literature.

Step 2 – Crafting the Perfect Introduction to Write a Book Review

In this second step of “how to write a book review,” we’re focusing on the art of creating a powerful opening that will hook your audience and set the stage for your analysis.

Identify Your Book and Author

Begin by mentioning the book you’ve chosen, including its  title  and the author’s name. This informs your readers and establishes the subject of your review.

Ponder the Title

Next, discuss the mental images or emotions the book’s title evokes in your mind . This helps your readers understand your initial feelings and expectations before diving into the book.

Judge the Book by Its Cover (Just a Little)

Take a moment to talk about the book’s cover. Did it intrigue you? Did it hint at what to expect from the story or the author’s writing style? Sharing your thoughts on the cover can offer a unique perspective on how the book presents itself to potential readers.

Present Your Thesis

Now it’s time to introduce your thesis. This statement should be a concise and insightful summary of your opinion of the book. For example:

“Normal People” by Sally Rooney is a captivating portrayal of the complexities of human relationships, exploring themes of love, class, and self-discovery with exceptional depth and authenticity.

Ensure that your thesis is relevant to the points or quotes you plan to discuss throughout your review.

Incorporating these elements into your introduction will create a strong foundation for your book review. Your readers will be eager to learn more about your thoughts and insights on the book, setting the stage for a compelling and thought-provoking analysis.

How to Write a Book Review: Step 3 – Building Brilliant Body Paragraphs

You’ve planned your review and written an attention-grabbing introduction. Now it’s time for the main event: crafting the body paragraphs of your book review. In this step of “how to write a book review,” we’ll explore the art of constructing engaging and insightful body paragraphs that will keep your readers hooked.

Summarize Without Spoilers

Begin by summarizing a specific section of the book, not revealing any major plot twists or spoilers. Your goal is to give your readers a taste of the story without ruining surprises.

Support Your Viewpoint with Quotes

Next, choose three quotes from the book that support your viewpoint or opinion. These quotes should be relevant to the section you’re summarizing and help illustrate your thoughts on the book.

Analyze the Quotes

Write a summary of each quote in your own words, explaining how it made you feel or what it led you to think about the book or the author’s writing. This analysis should provide insight into your perspective and demonstrate your understanding of the text.

Structure Your Body Paragraphs

Dedicate one body paragraph to each quote, ensuring your writing is well-connected, coherent, and easy to understand.

For example:

• In  Jane Eyre , Charlotte Brontë writes, “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me.” This powerful statement highlights Jane’s fierce independence and refusal to be trapped by societal expectations.
• In  Normal People , Sally Rooney explores the complexities of love and friendship when she writes, “It was culture as class performance, literature fetishized for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys.” This quote reveals the author’s astute observations on the role of culture and class in shaping personal relationships.
• In  Wuthering Heights , Emily Brontë captures the tumultuous nature of love with the quote, “He’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” This poignant line emphasizes the deep, unbreakable bond between the story’s central characters.

By following these guidelines, you’ll create body paragraphs that are both captivating and insightful, enhancing your book review and providing your readers with a deeper understanding of the literary work. 

How to Write a Book Review: Step 4 – Crafting a Captivating Conclusion

You’ve navigated through planning, introductions, and body paragraphs with finesse. Now it’s time to wrap up your book review with a  conclusion that leaves a lasting impression . In this final step of “how to write a book review,” we’ll explore the art of writing a memorable and persuasive conclusion.

Summarize Your Analysis

Begin by summarizing the key points you’ve presented in the body paragraphs. This helps to remind your readers of the insights and arguments you’ve shared throughout your review.

Offer Your Final Conclusion

Next, provide a conclusion that reflects your overall feelings about the book. This is your chance to leave a lasting impression and persuade your readers to consider your perspective.

Address the Book’s Appeal

Now, answer the question: Is this book worth reading? Be clear about who would enjoy the book and who might not. Discuss the taste preferences and circumstances that make the book more appealing to some readers than others.

For example:  The Alchemist is a book that can enchant a young teen, but those who are already well-versed in classic literature might find it less engaging.

Be Subtle and Balanced

Avoid simply stating whether you “liked” or “disliked” the book. Instead, use nuanced language to convey your message. Highlight the pros and cons of reading the type of literature you’ve reviewed, offering a balanced perspective.

Bringing It All Together

By following these guidelines, you’ll craft a conclusion that leaves your readers with a clear understanding of your thoughts and opinions on the book. Your review will be a valuable resource for those considering whether to pick up the book, and your witty and insightful analysis will make your review a pleasure to read. So conquer the world of book reviews, one captivating conclusion at a time!

How to Write a Book Review: Step 5 – Rating the Book (Optional)

You’ve masterfully crafted your book review, from the introduction to the conclusion. But wait, there’s one more step you might consider before calling it a day: rating the book. In this optional step of “how to write a book review,” we’ll explore the benefits and methods of assigning a rating to the book you’ve reviewed.

Why Rate the Book?

Sometimes, when writing a professional book review, it may not be appropriate to state whether you liked or disliked the book. In such cases, assigning a rating can be an effective way to get your message across without explicitly sharing your personal opinion.

How to Rate the Book

There are various rating systems you can use to evaluate the book, such as:

• A star rating (e.g., 1 to 5 stars)
• A numerical score (e.g., 1 to 10)
• A letter grade (e.g., A+ to F)

Choose a rating system that best suits your style and the format of your review. Be consistent in your rating criteria, considering writing quality, character development, plot, and overall enjoyment.

Tips for Rating the Book

Here are some tips for rating the book effectively:

• Be honest: Your rating should reflect your true feelings about the book. Don’t inflate or deflate your rating based on external factors, such as the book’s popularity or the author’s reputation.
• Be fair:Consider the book’s merits and shortcomings when rating. Even if you didn’t enjoy the book, recognize its strengths and acknowledge them in your rating.
• Be clear: Explain the rationale behind your rating so your readers understand the factors that influenced your evaluation.

Wrapping Up

By including a rating in your book review, you provide your readers with an additional insight into your thoughts on the book. While this step is optional, it can be a valuable tool for conveying your message subtly yet effectively. So, rate those books confidently, adding a touch of wit and wisdom to your book reviews.

Additional Tips on How to Write a Book Review: A Guide

In this segment, we’ll explore additional tips on how to write a book review. Get ready to captivate your readers and make your review a memorable one!

Hook ’em with an Intriguing Introduction

Keep your introduction precise and to the point. Readers have the attention span of a goldfish these days, so don’t let them swim away in boredom. Start with a bang and keep them hooked!

Embrace the World of Fiction

When learning how to write a book review, remember that reviewing fiction is often more engaging and effective. If your professor hasn’t assigned you a specific book, dive into the realm of fiction and select a novel that piques your interest.

Opinionated with Gusto

Don’t shy away from adding your own opinion to your review. A good book review always features the writer’s viewpoint and constructive criticism. After all, your readers want to know what  you  think!

Express Your Love (or Lack Thereof)

If you adored the book, let your readers know! Use phrases like “I’ll definitely return to this book again” to convey your enthusiasm. Conversely, be honest but respectful even if the book wasn’t your cup of tea.

Templates and Examples and Expert Help: Your Trusty Sidekicks

Feeling lost? You can always get help from formats, book review examples or online  college paper writing service  platforms. These trusty sidekicks will help you navigate the world of book reviews with ease. 

Be a Champion for New Writers and Literature

Remember to uplift new writers and pieces of literature. If you want to suggest improvements, do so kindly and constructively. There’s no need to be mean about anyone’s books – we’re all in this literary adventure together!

Criticize with Clarity, Not Cruelty

When adding criticism to your review, be clear but not mean. Remember, there’s a fine line between constructive criticism and cruelty. Tread lightly and keep your reader’s feelings in mind.

Avoid the Comparison Trap

Resist the urge to compare one writer’s book with another. Every book holds its worth, and comparing them will only confuse your reader. Stick to discussing the book at hand, and let it shine in its own light.

Top 7 Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Writing a book review can be a delightful and rewarding experience, especially when you balance analysis, wit, and personal insights. However, some common mistakes can kill the brilliance of your review. 

In this section of “how to write a book review,” we’ll explore the top 7 blunders writers commit and how to steer clear of them, with a dash of  modernist literature  examples and tips for students writing book reviews as assignments.

Succumbing to the Lure of Plot Summaries

Mistake: Diving headfirst into a plot summary instead of dissecting the book’s themes, characters, and writing style.

Example: “The Bell Jar chronicles the life of a young woman who experiences a mental breakdown.”

How to Avoid: Delve into the book’s deeper aspects, such as its portrayal of mental health, societal expectations, and the author’s distinctive narrative voice. Offer thoughtful insights and reflections, making your review a treasure trove of analysis.

Unleashing the Spoiler Kraken

Mistake: Spilling major plot twists or the ending without providing a spoiler warning, effectively ruining the reading experience for potential readers.

Example: “In Metamorphosis, the protagonist’s transformation into a monstrous insect leads to…”

How to Avoid: Tread carefully when discussing significant plot developments, and consider using spoiler warnings. Focus on the impact of these plot points on the overall narrative, character growth, or thematic resonance.

Riding the Personal Bias Express

Mistake: Allowing personal bias to hijack the review without providing sufficient evidence or reasoning to support opinions.

Example: “I detest books about existential crises, so The Sun Also Rises was a snoozefest.”

How to Avoid: While personal opinions are valid, it’s crucial to back them up with specific examples from the book. Discuss aspects like writing style, character development, or pacing to support your evaluation and provide a more balanced perspective.

Wielding the Vague Language Saber

Mistake: Resorting to generic, vague language that fails to capture the nuances of the book and can come across as clichéd.

Example: “This book was mind-blowing. It’s a must-read for everyone.”

How to Avoid: Use precise and descriptive language to express your thoughts. Employ specific examples and quotations to highlight memorable scenes, the author’s unique writing style, or the impact of the book’s themes on readers.

Ignoring the Contextualization Compass

Mistake: Neglecting to provide context about the author, genre, or cultural relevance of the book, leaving readers without a proper frame of reference.

Example: “This book is dull and unoriginal.”

How to Avoid: Offer readers a broader understanding by discussing the author’s background, the genre conventions the book adheres to or subverts, and any societal or historical contexts that inform the narrative. This helps readers appreciate the book’s uniqueness and relevance.

Overindulging in Personal Preferences

Mistake: Letting personal preferences overshadow an objective assessment of the book’s merits.

Example: “I don’t like stream-of-consciousness writing, so this book is automatically bad.”

How to Avoid: Acknowledge personal preferences but strive to evaluate the book objectively. Focus on the book’s strengths and weaknesses, considering how well it achieves its goals within its genre or intended audience.

Forgetting the Target Audience Telescope

Mistake: Failing to mention the book’s target audience or who might enjoy it, leading to confusion for potential readers.

Example: “This book is great for everyone.”

How to Avoid: Contemplate the book’s intended audience, genre, and themes. Mention who might particularly enjoy the book based on these factors, whether it’s fans of a specific genre, readers interested in character-driven stories, or those seeking thought-provoking narratives.

By dodging these common pitfalls, writers can craft insightful, balanced, and engaging book reviews that help readers make informed decisions about their reading choices.

These tips are particularly beneficial for students writing book reviews as assignments, as they ensure a well-rounded and thoughtful analysis.!

Many students requested us to cover how to write a book review. This thorough guide is sure to help you. At Paperperk, professionals are dedicated to helping students find their balance. We understand the importance of good grades, so we offer the finest writing service , ensuring students stay ahead of the curve. So seek expert help because only Paperperk is your perfect solution!

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How to Write a Book Review Explained by Experts From A to Z

Book review writing involves more than summarizing the plot – it combines thoughtful analysis, subjective reflection, and effective communication. Whether you're a student tasked with a literary assignment or a passionate reader eager to share your insights, understanding how to write an analysis can be a transformative journey into the heart of literature.

What Is a Book Review: Definition and General Description

A book review essay is a nuanced and subjective examination of a literary work that goes beyond a mere summary or plot recounting. It is a form of critical analysis where the student delves into the various elements that constitute the book, providing insights into its themes, characters, writing style, and overall impact. Unlike a book report, which primarily focuses on a concise summary, a critique aims to offer a more profound understanding and evaluation of the work's merits and shortcomings.

At its core, a book analysis serves as a literary critique, presenting your interpretation and assessment of the author's narrative choices and storytelling techniques. It is not solely an expression of personal preference; rather, it seeks to engage in a broader conversation about the book's significance in the context of literature. A well-crafted assessment gives readers a sense of the reviewer's experience and perspective, guiding them in deciding whether the book aligns with their own literary preferences and interests. Use our book review writing service to streamline the process if you lack time or motivation. 

Additionally, a literature commentary plays a crucial role in the literary ecosystem. It serves as a bridge between the author and potential readers, helping the latter make informed decisions about their reading choices. A thoughtful report can contribute to a vibrant literary discourse, fostering a community where readers share their interpretations, reflections, and critiques. All in all, it is an exploration, an analysis, and a conversation that enriches the collective experience of literature. By the way, you can also try our literature review service to cover this aspect of academic writing, too.  

How to Write a Good Book Review: A Step-by-Step Guide

In this step-by-step guide to writing a book review, we'll guide you through writing a compelling assessment, offering a roadmap to express your thoughts eloquently and constructively. Whether you find yourself dissecting a novel as a student for academic purposes or you're a fervent reader keen on sharing your insights with a wider audience, this guide is designed to unravel the intricacies of the writing process.

We’re going to share practical tips and a systematic approach to empower you in crafting critiques that not only reflect your unique perspective but also add depth to the ongoing discourse about literature. Our goal is to ensure that you can articulate your thoughts effectively and make meaningful contributions to the broader literary conversation. So, let's dive into the steps that will empower you to prepare a report that not only captures the essence of the work but also reflects your unique perspective as a reader and critic. Should you ever need an article review service , our website has it as well. Check it out!

Step 1: Pre-writing Planning

Writers typically navigate through four key stages:

A. Present the book

• Outline the general topic.
• Indicate the target audience.
• Contextualize the book within its field.

B. Create a book review outline

• Provide a general overview of its organization.
• Specify the topic of each chapter or section.

C. Determine the book parts

• Choose specific chapters or themes for evaluation.
• Critique the book's overall argument.

D. Evaluate the book

• Comment on content aspects.
• Indicate how it fulfills readers' needs.
• Remark on its format, price, and value for money.
• Make purchase recommendations or suggest otherwise.

When examining literature, these components are typically present, even if not always presented in the listed order. Some learners may prefer to begin with Stage 4 – evaluation – then proceed to Stages 1–3, concluding by justifying their initial evaluation. If you wish to expand your knowledge further, have a look at our guide on how to write an article review .

Step 2: Write an Introduction

Assuming you've selected your book, commence by mentioning the title and author. Discuss the book's cover and craft a thesis statement encapsulating your point of view and the essence of the fictional or non-fictional narrative. This thesis should succinctly capture the quoted material in the document.

Step 3: Arrange the Main Body

Select a specific chapter or scenario to summarize the main idea. Incorporate approximately three quotes in the body, accompanied by your own summaries and interpretations. It's crucial to provide your perspective on each quote, dedicating a paragraph to each.

Step 4: Formulate a Conclusion

Summarize the quotations and explanations from the body paragraphs. Conclude the book analysis with a final sentence that encapsulates the broader picture of the book. Pose the question, "Is it worth reading?" and respond subtly without resorting to a simple "like/dislike" statement.

Step 5: Give Ratings to a Book (Optional)

Consider including a rating after completing your writings. A star rating offers additional insights into the book's quality for your readers. While entirely optional, papers with star ratings can often be more impactful than those without. Consult our book report writing service if you want to cover this step in your assignment. 

Tips on Writing a Book Review

Composing a compelling book review essay requires a thoughtful approach that goes beyond summarizing the plot. Here are some useful tips to enhance your critique:

Start with a Hook

• Begin your analysis with a captivating introduction. Engage your readers with an interesting fact, a thought-provoking question, or a compelling quote related to the book.

Provide Context

• Offer background information about the author, the genre, or any relevant historical context. This helps readers understand the broader landscape in which the book exists.

Avoid Spoilers

• Be cautious not to give away major plot twists or endings. Your goal is to entice readers to explore the book themselves without revealing too much.

Balance Summary and Analysis

• Strike a balance between summarizing the key points of the book and offering your analysis. Provide enough information to give readers a sense of the plot while incorporating your insights and opinions.

Include Quotes

• Incorporate a few well-chosen quotes to illustrate the author's writing style or highlight significant themes. This adds depth to your critique and allows readers to grab the book and continue reading.

Express Your Opinions

• Share your personal opinions and reactions to the book. Be honest about what you liked or disliked, but support your opinions with specific examples from the text.

Consider the Target Audience

• Reflect on the intended audience for the book. Assess whether the author effectively caters to that audience and if the themes are relatable and relevant.

Critique Constructively

• If there are areas where the book falls short, provide constructive criticism. Explain your concerns in a way that lends a hand to both the author and potential readers to understand your perspective.

Conclude Thoughtfully

• Wrap up your assessment with a thoughtful conclusion. Summarize your main points in the piece, restate your overall impression, and recommend to potential readers.

Proofread and Edit

• Before publishing your appraisal, thoroughly proofread it for grammar and spelling errors. A polished critique enhances your credibility and ensures clarity. By incorporating these tips, you can create an evaluation that not only informs but also engages and guides potential readers in their literary choices. 

To increase your skills even further, check out our guide on how to write a literature review .

Book Review Example (FREE Download)

Consulting book review examples can be immensely beneficial for students eager to grasp the intricacies of crafting effective critiques. This example serves as a valuable reference, providing insights into structuring your analysis and expressing thoughtful critique. Feel free to download the PDF template and use it for inspiration and guidance.

What is the basic book review format?

What should you avoid when writing a book review, how long should a book review be, how do you write a book review, what is a book review.

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The only book review templates you'll ever need.

Whether you’re trying to become a book reviewer , writing a book report for school, or analyzing a book, it’s nice to follow a book review template to make sure that your thoughts are clearly presented. 

A quality template provides guidance to keep your mind sharp and your thoughts organized so that you can write the best book review possible. On Reedsy Discovery , we read and share a lot of book reviews, which helps us develop quite a clear idea what makes up a good one. With that in mind, we’ve put together some trustworthy book review templates that you can download, along with a quick run-through of all the parts that make up an outstanding review — all in this post! 

Pro-tip : But wait! How are you sure if you should become a book reviewer in the first place? If you're on the fence, or curious about your match with a book reviewing career, take our quick quiz:

Should you become a book reviewer?

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Book review templates for every type of review

With the rapid growth of the book community on Instagram, Youtube, and even TikTok, the world of book commentary has evolved far beyond your classic review. There are now many ways you can structure a book review. Some popular formats include:

• Book reports — often done for school assignments; 
• Commentary articles — think in-depth reviews in magazines and newspapers; 
• Book blog reviews — short personal essays about the book; and
• Instagram reviews — one or two-paragraph reviews captioned under a nice photo. 

But while the text in all these review styles can be organized in different ways, there are certain boxes that all good book reviews tick. So, instead of giving you various templates to use for different occasions, we’ve condensed it down to just two book review templates (one for fiction and one for nonfiction) that can guide your thoughts and help you nail just about any review. 

⭐ Download our free fiction book review template  

⭐ Download our free nonfiction book review template  

All you need to do is answer the questions in the template regarding the book you’re reading and you’ve got the content of your review covered. Once that’s done, you can easily put this content into its appropriate format. 

Now, if you’re curious about what constitutes a good book review template, we’ll explain it in the following section! 

Elements of a book review template

Say you want to build your own book review template, or you want to customize our templates — here are the elements you’ll want to consider. 

We’ve divided our breakdown of the elements into two categories: the essentials and the fun additions that’ll add some color to your book reviews.

What are the three main parts of a book review?

We covered this in detail (with the help of some stellar examples) in our post on how to write a book review , but basically, these are the three crucial elements you should know: 

The summary covers the premise of the book and its main theme, so readers are able to understand what you’re referring to in the rest of your review. This means that, if a person hasn’t read the book, they can go through the summary to get a quick idea of what it’s about. (As such, there should be no spoilers!) 

The analysis is where, if it’s a fiction book, you talk more about the book, its plot, theme, and characters. If it’s nonfiction, you have to consider whether the book effectively achieves what it set out to do. 

The recommendation is where your personal opinion comes in the strongest, and you give a verdict as to who you think might enjoy this book. 

You can choose to be brief or detailed, depending on the kind of review you’re writing, but you should always aim to cover these three points. If you’re needing some inspiration, check out these 17 book review examples as seen in magazines, blogs, and review communities like Reedsy Discovery for a little variation. 

Which review community should you join?

Find out which review community is best for your style. Takes 30 seconds!

Which additional details can you include?

Once you’ve nailed down the basics, you can jazz things up a little and add some personal flavor to your book review by considering some of these elements:

• A star-rating (the default is five stars but you can create your own scales); 
• A bullet-point pros and cons list; 
• Your favorite quotation from the book; 
• Commentary on the format you read (i.e., ebook, print, or audiobook);
• Fun facts about the book or author; 
• Other titles you think are similar.

This is where you can really be creative and tailor your review to suit your purpose and audience. A formal review written for a magazine, for instance, will likely benefit from contextual information about the author and the book, along with some comment on how that might have affected the reading (or even writing) process.

Meanwhile, if you’re reviewing a book on social media, you might find bullet points more effective at capturing the fleeting attention of Internet users. You can also make videos, take creative pictures, or even add your own illustrations for more personal touches. The floor is yours at this point, so go ahead and take the spotlight! 

That said, we hope that our templates can provide you with a strong foundation for even your most adventurous reviews. And if you’re interested in writing editorial reviews for up-and-coming indie titles, register as a reviewer on Reedsy Discovery !

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25+ Book Review Templates and Ideas to Organize Your Thoughts

Danika Ellis

Danika spends most of her time talking about queer women books at the Lesbrary. Blog: The Lesbrary Twitter: @DanikaEllis

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When I was a kid I loved reading, but I hated book reports. It felt impossible to boil a book down to a few lines or even a page of writing. Besides, by the time I had to write the report, I had already forgotten a lot. It never ceases to be painful to try to pull my thoughts and opinions out of my head and put them on the page, especially in a coherent way.

As an adult, I continue to usually find writing book reviews painful . And yet, I maintain a book blog with reviews of all the (bi and lesbian) books I read. Why? For one thing, I want to raise the visibility of these books — or, in the case of a book I loathed, warn other readers of what to expect. It helps me to build community with other book lovers. It’s also a great way to force myself pay attention to how I’m feeling while I’m reading a book and what my thoughts are afterwards. I have learned to take notes as I go, so I have something to refer to by the time I write a review, and it has me notice what a book is doing well (and what it isn’t). The review at the end helps me to organize my thoughts. I also find that I remember more once I’ve written a review.

Once you’ve decided it’s worthwhile to write a review, though, how do you get started? It can be a daunting task. The good news is, book reviews can adapt to whatever you want them to be. A book review can be a tweet with a thumbs up or thumbs down emoji, maybe with a sentence or two of your thoughts; it can also be an in-depth essay on the themes of the book and its influence on literature. Most are going to fall somewhere between those two! Let go of the idea of trying to create the One True Book Review. Everyone is looking for something different, and there is space for GIF-filled squee fests about a book and thoughtful, meditative explorations of a work.

This post offers a variety of book reviews elements that you can mix and match to create a book review template that works for you. Before you get started, though, there are some questions worth addressing.

Questions to Ask Before Choosing a Book Review Template

Where will you be posting your book reviews.

An Instagram book review will likely look different from a blog book review. Consider which platform you will be using for your book review. You can adapt it for different platforms, or link to your original review, but it’s a good starting point. Instagram reviews tend to be a lot shorter than blog reviews, for instance.

Will you be using the same template every time?

Some book reviewers have a go-to book review template. Others have a different one for each genre, while another group doesn’t use a template at all and just reacts to whatever each book brings up.

Heading or no headings?

When choosing which book review elements to mix and match, you can also decide whether to include a header for each section (like Plot, Characterization, Writing, etc). Headers make reviews easier to browse, but they may not have the professional, essay-style look that you’re going for.

Why are you writing a review?

When selecting which elements to include in your review, consider what the purpose is. Do you want to better remember the plot by writing about it? You probably want to include a plot summary, then. Do you want to help readers decide whether they should read this book? A pros and cons list might be helpful. Are you trying to track something about your reading, like an attempt to read more books in translation or more books by authors of color? Are you trying to buy fewer books and read off your TBR shelf instead? These are all things you can note in a review, usually in a point-form basic information block at the beginning.

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Book Review Templates and Formats

Essay-style.

This is a multi-paragraph review, usually with no headers. It’s the same format most newspapers and academics use for book reviews. Many essay-style reviews use informal categories in their writing, often discussing setting, writing, characters, and plot in their own paragraphs. They usually also discuss the big themes/messages of a story. Here are some questions to consider when writing an essay-style review:

What is the author trying to do? Don’t evaluate a romance novel based on a mystery novel’s criteria. First try to think about what the book was attempting to do, then try to evaluate if they achieved it. You can still note if you didn’t like it, but it’s good to know what it was aiming for first.

What are some of the themes of the story? What big message should the reader take away? Did you agree with what the book seemed to be saying? Why or why not?

How is this story relevant to the world? What is it saying about the time it was written in? About human nature? About society or current issues? Depending on the book, there may be more or less to dig into here.

What did this book make you think about? It may be that the themes in the book were just a launching off point. How did they inspire your own thinking? How did this book change you?

A Classic Book Review

This is probably the most common kind of book review template. It uses a few criteria, usually including Setting, Writing, Characters, and Plot (for a novel). The review then goes into some detail about each element, describing what the book did well, and where it fell short.

The advantage of this format is that it’s very straightforward and applies to almost any fiction read. It can also be adapted–you will likely have more to say about the plot in a mystery/thriller than a character study of a novel. A drawback, though, is that it can feel limiting. You might have thoughts that don’t neatly fit into these categories, or you could feel like you don’t have enough to say about some of the categories.

Pros and Cons

A common format for a Goodreads review is some variation of pros and cons. This might be “What I Liked/What I Didn’t Like” or “Reasons to Bump This Up Your TBR/Reasons to Bump This Down On Your TBR.” This is a very flexible system that can accommodate anything from a few bullet points each to paragraphs each. It gives a good at-a-glance impression of your thoughts (more cons than pros is a pretty good indication you didn’t like it). It also is broad enough that almost all your thoughts can likely be organized into those headings.

This is also a format that is easily mix and matched with the elements listed below. A brief review might give the title, author, genre, some brief selling points of the novel, and then a pros and cons list. Some reviews also include a “verdict” at the end. An example of this format:

The Tea Dragon Society by Katie O’Neill

🌟 Fantasy All-Ages Comic 💫 Adorable pet dragons ✨ A diverse cast

Pros: This book has beautiful artwork. It is a soothing read, and all the character are supportive of each other. This is a story about friendship and kindness.

Cons: Don’t expect a fast-moving plot or a lot of conflict. This is a very gentle read.

Another approach to the review is not, strictly speaking, a book review template at all. Instead, it’s something like “5 Reasons to Read TITLE by Author” or “The # Most Shocking Plot Twists in X Series.” An advantage of this format is that it can be very to-the-point: if you want to convince people to read a book, it makes sense to just write a list of reasons they should read the book. It may also be more likely to get clicked on–traditional book reviews often get less views than more general posts.

On the other hand, listicles can come off as gimmicky or click-bait. You’ll have to decide for yourself if the book matches this format, and whether you are writing this out of genuine enthusiasm or are just trying to bend a review to be more clickable.

Your Own Original Rating System

Lots of reviewers decide to make their own review format based on what matters to them. This is often accompanied by a ratings system. For instance, the BookTube channel Book Roast uses the CAWPILE system:

CAWPILE is an acronym for the criteria she rates: Characters, Atmosphere, Writing, Plot, Intrigue, Logic, Enjoyment. Each of those are rated 1–10, and the average given is the overall rating. By making your own ratings/review system, you can prioritize what matters to you.

My favorite rating system is Njeri’s from Onyx Pages , because it shows exactly what she’s looking for from books, and it helps her to think about and speak about the things she values:

A “Live Tweet” or Chronological Review

Another format possibility is live tweeting (or updating as you go on Goodreads, or whatever your platform of choice is). This has you document your initial thoughts as you read, and it’s usually informal and often silly. You can add what you’re loving, what you’re hating, and what questions you have as you go.

This is a fun format for when you’re reading a popular book for the first time. That way, other people can cackle at how unprepared you are as you read it. This requires you to remember to always have your phone on you as you read, to get your authentic thoughts as they happen, but it saves on having to write a more in-depth review. Alternately, some people include both a “first impressions” section and a more in-depth analysis section in their final review.

Get Creative

There are plenty of book review templates to choose from and elements to mix-and-match, but you can also respond in a completely original way. You could create a work of art in response to the book! Here are some options:

• Writing a song , a short story, or a poem
• Writing a letter to the author or the main character (you don’t have to send it to the author!)
• Writing an “interview” of a character from the book, talk show style
• Making a visual response, like a collage or painting
• Making a book diorama, like your elementary school days!

Mix-and-Match Elements of a Book Review

Most book reviews are made up of a few different parts, which can be combined in lots of different ways. Here is a selection to choose from! These might also give you ideas for your own elements. Don’t take on too much, though! It can easily become an overwhelming amount of information for readers.

Information

Usually a book review starts with some basic information about the book. What you consider basic information, though, is up for interpretation! Consider what you and your audience will think is important. Here are some ideas:

• The title and author (pretty important)
• The book’s cover
• Format (audiobook, comic, poetry, etc)
• Genre (this can be broad, like SFF, or narrow, like Silkpunk or Dark Academia)
• Content warnings
• Source (where did you get the book? Was is borrowed from the library, bought, or were you sent an ARC?)
• Synopsis/plot summary (your own or the publisher’s)
• What kind of representation there is in the novel (including race, disability, LGBTQ characters, etc)
• Anything you’re tracking in your reading, including: authors of color, authors’ country, if a book is in translation, etc

Review Elements

Once you’ve established your basic information, you’re into the review itself! Some of these are small additions to a review, while others are a little more time-intensive.

Bullet point elements:

• Rating (star rating, thumbs up/down, recommend/wouldn’t recommend, or your own scale)
• Who would like it/Who wouldn’t like it
• Read-alikes (or movies and TV shows like the book)
• Describe the book using an emoji or emojis
• Describe the book using a gif or gifs
• Favorite line(s) from the book
• New vocabulary/the most beautiful words in the novel
• How it made you feel (in a sentence or two)
• One word or one sentence review
• Bullet points listing the selling points of a book
• BooksandLala’s Scary, Unsettling, and Intrigue ratings, for horror
• World-building, for fantasy and science fiction titles
• Art, for comics
• Narration, for audiobooks
• Romance, for…romance
• Heat level, for erotica

Visual elements:

• Design a graphic (usually incorporating the cover, your star rating, and some other basic info)
• Take a selfie of yourself holding the book, with your expression as the review
• Make a mood board
• Design your own book cover
• Make fan art

Elements to incorporate into a review:

• Quick/initial thoughts (often while reading or immediately after reading), then a more in-depth review (common on Goodreads)
• A list of facts about the book or a character from the book
• Book club questions about the book
• Spoiler/non-spoiler sections
• Research: look up interviews with the author and critique of the book, incorporate it (cited!) into your review
• Links to other resources, such as interviews or other reviews — especially #OwnVoices reviews
• A story of your own, whether it’s your experience reading the book, or something it reminded you of

This is not a complete list! There are so many ways to write a book review, and it should reflect your own relationship with books, as well as your audience. If you’re looking for more ways to keep track of your reading, you’ll also like 50+ Beautiful Bujo Spread Ideas to Track Your Reading .

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👀 Book Review Example

🔗 references, ❓ what is a book review.

A book review is a form of literary criticism. There are several important elements to consider when writing one, such as the author’s style and themes of interest. The two most popular types are short summary reviews and critical reviews, which are longer.

Summary Book Review

The format of a book review depends on the purpose of your writing. A short summary review will not include any in-depth analysis. It’s merely a descriptive piece of writing that overviews key information about the book and its author. An effective summary review consists of:

• Reference to a chosen book in the form of a citation.
• A few words on the book’s purpose.
• Description of the main themes, ideas, and issues highlighted by the author.
• Brief information about other works on this topic, if applicable.
• A note about the author and visual materials of the book, along with its structure.

Critical Book Review

A critical book review is much longer than its summary counterpart and looks more like an analytical essay. You may be asked to write one as a college student. It includes:

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• Book citation and a hook in the introduction.
• A few words about the author’s intentions.
• An academic description of the main ideas and themes.
• Mention of errors in the text, if you found any.
• Discussion of the chosen book’s significance and how it has influenced the field.
• Some information about the author and the physical content of the book.
• Description of the audience and whether the writer’s style and ideas are engaging.

🧩 Book Review Outline

Check out the book review outline template below to learn more about structuring your paper. 

Introduction

The introduction of a book review should include some background information and your thesis statement.

• What is this book about?
• Who is the author?
• What were the reasons for writing this book?
• Who is this book for?
• What is the general problem the book addresses?

Brief book summary

A brief summary should provide an outline of the book’s main ideas or events.

• What are the main themes/ideas of the book?
• What is the plot?
• Who are the characters?
• What is the major emphasis of the work?

Critical review 

A critical review should focus on your evaluation of the author’s approach to writing about a particular issue.

• What did you like/dislike in the book?
• What are the book’s strengths and weaknesses?
• What do you agree/disagree with? Why?
• How does this book compare to other books on this topic?
• What matters does the book leave out?

The conclusion of a book review should finish with your personal assessment of the work.

• Has the author achieved the purpose of writing the book?
• Is this book worth reading?
• To whom would you recommend this book?
• What is your final opinion about it?
• What steel needs to be written on this subject?

Book Review Outline Example

We have prepared for you a book review outline example on Looking for Alaska by John Green. Check it out: 

• Hook: Have you ever searched for meaning amidst the chaos of teenage life? John Green’s Looking for Alaska embarks on that very journey, unveiling the messy realities of adolescence. 
• Overview of the book. 
• Information about the author. 
• Thesis statement: In Looking for Alaska , John Green skillfully crafts a narrative that delves into the turbulent journey of adolescence, exploring themes of friendship, identity, and the quest for meaning. 
• Introduction of the protagonist, Miles Halter. 
• Introduction of other characters and their roles in Halter’s life. 
• Key events of the book. 
• Green’s writing style and its effectiveness in portraying the turbulent emotions and confusion of adolescence. 
• The character development of Miles and his journey of self-discovery, grief, and understanding. 
• Exploration of how themes of friendship, identity, and the quest for meaning are depicted throughout the narrative. 
• Restated thesis. 
• Brief summary of main points. 
• Recommendation: I would recommend this thought-provoking book to fans of realistic fiction that doesn’t shy away from difficult topics.   

📋 Book Review Format

Here are several practical tips that can aid you in formatting your book review:

• Start with the book citation. Provide the necessary publication information about the book, including the author’s name, the full title of the book, and other elements required by your chosen citation style (e.g., APA, MLA, Chicago, etc.).
• Italicize the book title in the text. Whenever you mention the book title in your review, remember to type it in italics without using quotation marks. However, if you include the title of a book chapter, enclose it in quotation marks and don’t italicize it.
• Use a readable font. Type your book reviews using a 12-pt Arial or Times New Roman font.
• Apply standard document settings. These include 1-inch margins on all sides, double spacing, and flush left paragraph alignment.
• Use in-text citations. Always cite the information borrowed from other authors. This way, your readers will understand the origin of your ideas and distinguish your thoughts from those of others.
• Keep your review to 500-1500 words. When the professor does not indicate how many words to include in your book review, keep it to 2-5 double-spaced pages.

✍️ How to Write a Book Review?

The structure of a book review is like any other essay. That said, the process of writing one has its own idiosyncrasies. So, before moving to the three parts of the review (introduction, main body, and conclusion), you should study the chosen piece and make enough notes to work with.

Step #1: Choose a Book and Read It

Being interested in a book you’re about to analyze is one thing. Reading it deeply is quite another.

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Before you even dive into the text proper, think about what you already know about the book. Then, study the table of contents and make some predictions. What’s your first impression?

Now, it’s time to read it! Don’t take this step lightly. Keep a note log throughout the reading process and stop after each chapter to jot down a quick summary. If you find any particular point of interest along the way and feel you might want to discuss it in the review, highlight it to make it easier to find when you go back through the text. If you happen to have a digital copy, you can even use a shorten essay generator and save yourself some time.

Answering the following questions can also help you with this process.

Step #2: Create Your Book Review Outline

A solid outline should be the foundation of any worthy book review. It includes the key points you want to address and gives you a place to start from (and refer back to) throughout the writing process.

You are expected to produce at least five paragraphs if you want your review to look professional, including an introduction, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion .

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While analyzing your notes , consider the questions below.

Step #3: Write Your Book Review Introduction

With a layout firmly in place, it’s time to start writing your introduction. This process should be straightforward: mention the name of the book and its author and specify your first impression. The last sentence should always be your thesis statement, which summarizes your review’s thrust and critical findings.

Step #4: Write Your Book Review Body

Include at least three main ideas you wish to highlight. These can be about the writing style, themes, character, or plot. Be sure to support your arguments with evidence in the form of direct quotes (at least one per paragraph). Don’t be afraid to paraphrase the sentences that feel off. It’s better to aknowledge the mistakes yourself than have someone else point them out.

Step #5: Write Your Book Review Conclusion

Compose a brief summary of everything you wrote about in the main body. You should also paraphrase your thesis statement . For your closing sentence, comment on the value of the book. Perhaps it served as a source of useful insight, or you just appreciate the author’s intention to shed light on a particular issue.

Now you know how to write a book review. But if you need some more inspiration, check out the following sample review, which follows the basic outline described above.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: Book Review Example

If you want more examples, check out the list below!

• “The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership”: Book Review
• The Great Gatsby: A Book Review and Summary
• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Book Review
• Book Review: “They Say I Say”
• The Advancement by L. Russ Bush: Book Review
• Book Review “Religious, Feminist, Activist ” by Laurel Zwissler
• “Tell My Horse” by Zora Neale Hurston Book Review
• “Emotional Intelligence” by Daniel Goleman Book Review
• “Emotional Intelligence 2.0” by Bradberry and Greaves Book Review
• “Military Rule in America” by Karen L. Remmer: Book Review

Book Review Essay Topics

• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen : book review.
• The symbolic nature of the Canadian consumption culture in The Donut: A Canadian History by S. Penfold.
• The key lessons of the book Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki.
• Big Talk, Small Talk by Shola Kaye : a guide to effective communication.
• Review of the book The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood.
• The main ideas promoted in Thinking About Crime: Sense and Sensibility in American Penal Culture by M. Tonry.
• Exposition of young boys’ problems in Nikkah’s Our Boys Speak .
• Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf : book review.
• Discuss the message to future entrepreneurs in Phil Knight’s Shoe Dog .
• The main ideas of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey.
• Magical realism in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Juno Diaz.
• Book review: Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer .
• Psychological struggles of identity and isolation in Frankenstein by Mary Shelley .
• The principle of negotiation in the book Getting to Yes .
• Analyze the symbolism in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 .
• The role of family in Montana 1948 .
• Weaving the Web by Tim Berners-Lee : book review.
• Discuss the main topic of the book Death of a Salesman .
• Tragedy of the family in A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor.
• Realistic features of Afghanistan in The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini.
• Review of the book Montley Fool Money Guide .
• Description of the gap between two cultures in The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman.
• The effect of Puritan beliefs in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown .
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad as a prominent example of symbolism.
• The philosophical value of Oedipus the King by Sophocles .
• Discuss the description of gradual personality changes in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Black Cat .
• Review of the play Much Ado About Nothing by W. Shakespeare .
• Analyze the core theme of Sherman Alexie’s book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian .
• Family values and culture preservation issues in J.D. Vance Book Hillbilly Elegy .
• Problems of teenagers’ behavior in Nothing but the Truth by Avi .
• The role of women in society in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar .
• Satire on the Victorian society customs in The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde .
• Danger of obsession with new technologies in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Birthmark .
• Describe the controversial messages of Why Don’t You Dance by Raymond Carver .
• Examine the central problem of the novel Motorcycle Ride on the Sea of Tranquility by Patricia Santana .
• Review of the book Billy Budd by Herman Melville .
• The fundamental philosophical problems of perception and consciousness in The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares.
• Discuss the role of the illusory world Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie .
• Gender roles in A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen.
• Analyze the main topic of Death by Landscape by Margaret Atwood.
• Book Review – The New York Times
• Book Reviews – UNC Writing Center
• Writing a Book Review – USC Writing Center
• Books | The Guardian
• Book Reviews : NPR – NPR
• Book Reviews // Purdue Writing Lab
• Book Reviews | Nature
• The New York Review of Books: Home
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I need a seven page Book report on Booker T. Washington. Instructions below from instructor title, your name, and then seven paragraphs and seven pages – no more no less.

get rid of the outline format.

They combine your ideas into seven paragraphs.

Each paragraph that has quotes should have a topic sentence followed by the five sentences with quotes and endnotes, followed by the concluding sentence.

You do not need any quotes in the introduction or in the summary.

So seven paragraphs total.

Each paragraph needs to be 13 – 17 lines, lines on a page and not sentences.

So, delete the outline format.

Combine your ideas into seven paragraphs.

Make sure that each paragraph has between 13–17 lines.

And make sure your overall length is in seven pages, no more no less.

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Book Review

Book Review Examples

Last updated on: Nov 20, 2023

Good Book Review Examples to Help you Write a Great Review

By: Nova A.

Reviewed By: Chris H.

Published on: Mar 30, 2021

A book review is a common assignment that allows the students to demonstrate the author’s intentions in the book. It also provides them with the chance not only to criticize but also to give constructive criticism on how they can make improvements.

The purpose of writing a book review is to come up with your opinion about the author’s ideas presented in the book. On the other hand, a book analysis is completely based on opinions that are relevant to the book.

Writing a review is something that can be done with any book that you read. However, some genres are harder to write. But with a proper plan, you can easily write a great review on any book.

Read some short book review examples in this guide. They will help you understand the key elements of writing a great review in no time.

On this Page

Academic Book Review Examples

If you are assigned to write a book review, referring to some examples will be of great help. In addition, reading examples before starting the writing process will help you understand what elements are needed for a great book review. There are also many review sites online you can get help from.

Academic book reviews follow a fairly simple structure. It usually includes an introduction, middle paragraphs, and a conclusion that sums up all the ideas.

For a great book review, here are the things you need to focus on during the writing process.

• The main argument presented by the author
• Author’s methodologyAppropriateness for the audience
• Relationship to the real world

Have a look at the following book review examples for kids before beginning the writing process.

Book Review Examples for Middle School Students

Book Review Example For Kids

Book Review Examples for High School Students

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Book Review Examples for College Students

Book Review Examples for University Students

How to Write a Book Review - Examples

If you don’t know how to write a book review, look at the following steps.

The first step is to plan and create an outline that includes all the points that you will have to cover in the review. Don’t forget to include all the information about the characters, plot information, and some other parts of the chosen book.

The three parts of a book review are:

1. Provide a Summary

What is the book about? Write about the main characters and what is the conflict that is discussed in the book.

2. Provide Your Evaluation

Share your thoughts about the book and what elements work best.

3. Rate the Book

Rate and recommend the book to others who will enjoy reading this book.

If you need to submit a book review soon, we suggest you start reading some book reviews online. Here you can also find some good book review writing examples to understand how to craft each section of a book review.

Book Review Introduction Examples

Thesis Statement Book Review Examples

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Book Review Conclusion Examples

Critical Book Review Examples

A book review is a critical evaluation of the book, movie, or any other literary work. It has two goals: the first is to inform the readers about the content of the book, and the second is to evaluate your judgment about the book.

A book review is more than a book report. A review is basically a critical essay that evaluates the merits of a literary work. The purpose of writing a book review is not to prove that you have read a book but to show that you think critically about the chosen book.

When you are asked to write a critical book review, you need to identify, summarize and evaluate the ideas of the author. In simpler words, you will be examining and evaluating another person’s work from your point of view.

Science Book Review Examples

A scientific book review will contain the same elements as writing a review for a fiction book; some elements might vary. When you are reviewing a scientific text, you need to pay attention to the writing style and the validity of the content.

Most students turn to non-fictional sources of information. It is important to make sure the information you provide in your review is factual and scientific.

Book review writing can be difficult if you don’t know how to follow the standard protocols. That’s where our reliable book review writing service aims to provide the necessary help.

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Frequently Asked Questions

How do you write a book review example.

Here are some steps that will help you to write a book review example.

• Start writing with few sentences and describe what the book is all about
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As a Digital Content Strategist, Nova Allison has eight years of experience in writing both technical and scientific content. With a focus on developing online content plans that engage audiences, Nova strives to write pieces that are not only informative but captivating as well.

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Overall, AiBro’s combination of natural language understanding, contextual understanding, large knowledge base, creativity, language generation capabilities, iterative improvement, and accessibility makes it well-suited for the task of generating book titles by word using AI.

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Does It Seem Like the End Times Are Here? These Novels Know Better.

What can fiction tell us about the apocalypse? Ayana Mathis finds unexpected hope in novels of crisis by Ling Ma, Jenny Offill and Jesmyn Ward.

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By Ayana Mathis

Ayana Mathis’s most recent novel, “The Unsettled,” was published in September.

• April 11, 2024

On the day my mother died, I sat by her bedside and read the Psalms. The room was quiet — the need for machines had passed — save for the sound of my voice and my mother’s labored breathing. Outside her room, the hospital went about its business: Lunch trays were delivered, nurses conferred, a television played too loudly down the corridor. Out there, time passed in its usual, unremarkable way. In her room, my mother and I had stepped off time’s familiar track.

Everything inessential vanished in her final hours. I read the Psalms because they comforted her. I told her I loved her. She squeezed my hand, which, in that afternoon when she was no longer able to speak, was as profound an expression of love as any words had ever been. When she died hours later, I knew that on the other side of her hospital room door there awaited, at least for me, an altered world.

The subject of this essay is apocalypse, and so I have begun with an ending. If you have lost a deeply beloved, then you have experienced the obliterating finality of death, that catastrophe in the small universe of an individual life. The loss also brings a realization: The “worst thing” that could happen is no longer a future projection; it has exploded into the present.

Apocalypse is generally understood as a future event: widespread suffering, extinctions, various iterations of end-time destruction gunning for us from some tomorrow. Out there, in the vast, unknowable not-yet, apocalypse roars. It paralyzes us with fear, deadens us into numbness or provokes us to hysteria. We are powerless in its face.

But what if we could change our relationship with the end by shifting our perspective on it? The first step might be dwelling more profoundly in the here and now where our crises amass, rather than focusing on the boogeyman future. We already know something about how to do this: We are creatures of loss; we have confronted, or will confront, the “worst things” in the real time of our lives. There is a precedent, then, for how, in this moment, we might collectively approach the apocalyptic worst things. While our beloved still lives, there is possibility: We can give her our attention; we can hold her hand.

I won’t downplay the current horrors — tens of thousands dead in Gaza, conflict in Ukraine, the high-stakes presidential election on the horizon — or imply that all will turn out right. The novels in this essay don’t do that either. Instead, they suggest new ways of seeing: a shift to deeper present-time awareness, even wonder, as the times grow ever more dire. The theologian Catherine Keller calls this “apocalyptic mindfulness.” “A cloud of roiling possibility seems to reveal itself,” she writes in “Facing Apocalypse” (2021). “It guarantees no happy ending. It may, however, enhance the uncertain chance of better outcomes.”

Many of our end-time notions are inflected by the biblical Book of Revelation. Its phantasmagoric visions and lurid scenes of destruction have thoroughly infiltrated Western talk of the end: the Four Horsemen, the beast we call the Antichrist (though Revelation doesn’t use the term), fires, plagues and raging pestilence. It may come as a surprise, then, that apokalypsis, the Greek word for “revelation,” means not “ending” but “unveiling.” As Keller writes, “It means not closure but dis-closure — that is, opening. A chance to open our eyes?” But, to what?

In Ling Ma’s novel “ Severance ” (2018), newly pregnant Candace Chen wanders a near-deserted New York City in the midst of a pandemic caused by a disease called Shen Fever. The majority of the city’s residents have fled or become “fevered,” a zombielike state that leaves victims stuck on repeat: a family endlessly setting the table and saying grace; a saleswoman, her jaw half eaten by decay, folding and refolding polo shirts at an abandoned Juicy Couture store on Fifth Avenue. The fevered are the least threatening zombies imaginable: so busy with their mindless performance of mundane tasks that they don’t notice the living. Ma has a knack for nuanced satire.

Candace sticks around because she’s got nowhere else to go; she’s the orphaned child of Chinese immigrants who died years before. Inexplicably, and perhaps somewhat to her dismay, she remains virus-free. As the pandemic shuts down the city, she doggedly persists with her job in the Bibles department at Spectra, a book production company: “I clicked Send, knowing it was fruitless,” she says. When public transportation stops entirely, she moves into her office on the 32nd floor, overlooking an empty Times Square.

It doesn’t take long to understand that a vast grief underlies Candace’s workaholic paralysis. So intense is her mourning for her parents that for a while the pandemic hardly registers. She needs to hold on to something, even pointless work at Spectra. The office setting is no coincidence: In some sense, Candace, too, is fevered, and her job’s rote repetition is a kind of anesthetic.

The dull but familiar grind of late-capitalist working life acts as a numbing agent, or perhaps a blindfold. When work dries up because the rest of the world is no longer at its desk, Candace rambles around the city utterly alone, taking pictures of derelict buildings that she posts on a blog she calls “NY Ghost.” One afternoon she enters a flooded subway station. “You couldn’t even see the water beneath all the garbage,” Ma writes. “The deeper you tunneled down, the bigger the sound, echoed and magnified by the enclosed space, until this primordial slurp was all that existed.” Grieving Candace is adrift, her internal landscape aligned with the desolation of the external world.

Published two years before the Covid pandemic, “Severance” offers an eerily prescient description of a nation shocked and exhausted. For so many, 2020 was a kind of apocalyptic unveiling. The pandemic revealed the fault lines in our health care and our schools, as well as the fact that so many of us were living in perpetual economic precarity. Then there were the deaths, which as a country we have hardly begun to mourn. Painfully and all at once, we understood the fragility of the systems we relied on, and the instability of our own lives.

Yet alongside the devastation there was transient beauty: In many places, air and water quality improved during lockdown and wildlife resurged. Health-care and essential workers were acknowledged and more respected; we realized the extent of our dependence on one another. If only for a little while, we were thrown into Keller’s “apocalyptic mindfulness.” But the eye snapped shut. We “recovered,” and, like Candace, we find ourselves once again in a collective disquiet, punctuated by bouts of terror as we contemplate the future.

On the final afternoon of her wandering, Candace ventures into the same Juicy Couture store she’d photographed weeks before. Ominously, the fevered saleswoman has been bludgeoned to death. Candace’s unborn child seems frightened too: “The baby moved inside of me, fluttering frantically.” Candace leaves Manhattan through the Lincoln Tunnel in a yellow taxi she’s commandeered from a fevered driver. She joins a band of survivors led by a creepy zealot named Bob, a former I.T. guy who wears a brace for carpal tunnel syndrome, that most banal of white-collar work maladies. They journey to the Chicago suburbs to homestead in a deserted mall. (I told you Ma has a knack for satire.)

In this semi-cult, Candace’s grief intensifies. She begins to have visions of her mother, who warns her that she and her unborn baby aren’t safe with Bob. Candace’s mother is right. Bob has a penchant for shooting the fevered in the head if he encounters them when he and the others go “stalking” for food and supplies. We squirm at these killings, even if the victims are not quite alive, at least not in the usual sense. Bob’s violent demagoguery opens Candace’s eyes to her metaphorically fevered state, and as we look into the mirror the novel holds up to us, we begin to wonder about our relationship to our own beleaguered world.

At last, Candace’s fever breaks and, fully alive, she escapes Bob and the others in a Nissan stolen from the group’s mini-fleet. She drives into once grand Chicago, swerving to avoid abandoned cars clogging Milwaukee Avenue. Finally, she runs out of gas. “Up ahead there’s a massive littered river, planked by an elaborate, wrought-iron red bridge,” she recounts. “Beyond the bridge is more skyline, more city. I get out and start walking.”

The “end” for Candace and her baby is not, in fact, an ending, but rather, an awakening that follows revelation.

If “Severance” chronicles its protagonist’s end-time stirrings from the stupor of grief, Jenny Offill’s novel “ Weather ” (2020) is its manic cousin, a diaristic account of climate anxiety. Narrated in the first person, aggressively present tense and composed of short chapters that leap from association to observation, the book is like a panicked brain in overdrive.

“Weather”’s protagonist, Lizzie, works as a university librarian in New York City. Her former professor, Sylvia, a climate change expert, finagled the gig for her though Lizzie isn’t really qualified. “Years ago, I was her grad student,” Lizzie explains, “but then I gave up on it. She used to check in on me sometimes to see if I was still squandering my promise. The answer was always yes.”

Lizzie is all wry self-deprecation. As the book progresses, we understand that she is less an underachiever than an empath, so often overwhelmed that her focus scrambles. Or perhaps it’s that she is deeply attentive to things we try to ignore. Her experience of the world is the opposite of Candace’s near-impenetrable grief. Lizzie is porous. Too much gets in: grave news about the environment, the plights of relative strangers — like kindly Mr. Jimmy, a car-service owner being run out of business by Uber. Lizzie “helps” by taking Mr. Jimmy’s car to various appointments, though she can’t afford it and the traffic makes her late.

The novel doesn’t so much unfold as tumble out over the course of a turbulent year that encompasses Donald Trump’s election in 2016. After Trump’s win, tensions rise in Lizzie’s Brooklyn neighborhood. Even Mr. Jimmy is spewing casual vitriol about Middle Eastern people and car bombs. Lizzie’s husband, Ben, retreats to the couch, to read a “giant history of war.” And I haven’t even mentioned Henry, Lizzie’s depressive, recovering-addict brother, who meets a woman, marries and has a baby, all at whiplash speed. When the marriage implodes, Henry winds up on Lizzie and Ben’s couch, using again and barely able to parent his daughter.

For Lizzie, as for most of us, personal and collective catastrophes run parallel. Her vision of the future grows ever darker. She talks to Sylvia about buying land somewhere cooler, where Eli, her young son, and Iris, her newborn niece, might fare better in 30 years or so. “Do you really think you can protect them? In 2047?” Sylvia asks.

“I look at her,” Lizzie thinks. “Because until this moment, I did, I did somehow think this.” The realization of her helplessness is unbearable, but Lizzie knows she must bear it: This bleak state of affairs is her son’s inheritance.

Lizzie is gripped by grief and despair — she spends far too much time on doomsday prepper websites — both complicated responses to a planet in the midst of radical, damaging change. “In a world of mortal beings,” Keller writes in “Facing Apocalypse,” “it would seem that without some work of mourning, responsibility for that world cannot develop.” Lizzie’s sense of loss and futility is wrenching, but her response attaches her that much more deeply to this world. Her anxiety is acute because the time in which to act is limited and shot through with urgency.

Lizzie experiences her moment as unprecedented; her end-time sensibility suggests an analogy, albeit to a starkly different context. The Apostle Paul also understood himself to be living through an extraordinary rupture in time. Paul's zeal to spread the Gospel through the ancient world was fueled by his conviction that ordinary time, and life, had been profoundly derailed by Christ’s crucifixion, and was soon to end with his imminent Second Coming. Paul believed he was living in an in-between time that the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has aptly called “ the time that remains ,” a phrase borrowed from Paul’s letter to the fledgling church at Corinth. “The time is short,” Paul wrote. “From now on those who have wives should live as if they do not; those who mourn, as if they did not; those who are happy, as if they were not.”

The old world and its rules had not yet passed away but the prospect of Christ’s return cast an altering light on the present, highlighting the impermanence of all things. Everything was revealed to be in flux and therefore subject to reversals and change.

In “Weather,” Lizzie’s frazzled report from the event horizon of impending disaster, the time that remains means that moments are more precious, less bound by previous rules of engagement and more open to radically new ones. Near the end of the novel, Henry reclaims his sobriety, and Lizzie finds renewed, if melancholic, love for this imperiled world. She wants to find a new way to engage, even as she is uncertain what that might be. “There’s the idea in the different traditions. Of the veil,” Lizzie says. “What if we were to tear through it?” The image recalls Keller’s apokalypsis — a revelatory “ dis-closure .”

Jesmyn Ward’s “ Salvage the Bones ” (2011) takes a very different approach to apocalypse. The novel is set over 12 days, before and just after Hurricane Katrina strikes the Gulf Coast. The 15-year-old narrator, Esch, her father and three brothers live in the Mississippi Delta, outside a coastal town Ward calls Bois Sauvage. Unlike other characters we have encountered, Ward’s need no awakening; and time is far too short for existential anxiety or long-term planning.

The novel opens as China, a pit bull belonging to Esch’s brother Skeetah, is giving birth. Moody, commanding China is the love of Skeetah’s young life and as vivid as any human character in the book. “What China is doing is fighting, like she was born to do,” Ward writes. “Fight our shoes, fight other dogs, fight these puppies that are reaching for the outside, blind and wet.” Skeetah hopes to sell China’s puppies for big money. Enough to send his older brother, Randall, to basketball camp, where, the family hopes, he’ll be noticed by college scouts. Enough, perhaps, to help Esch take care of her baby. Esch is pregnant, though not far enough along to show, and she is in love with the baby’s father, her brother Randall’s friend Manny, who keeps her a secret and won’t kiss her on the mouth.

The novel is full of mothers: mothers to be, absent mothers (Esch’s mother died in childbirth years before), animal mothers, even mythical mothers (Esch is fixated on the avenging Medea, whom she’s read about in school). And, of course, Mother Nature is flying across the gulf, heading straight for Bois Sauvage. Mothers in this novel are makers and destroyers. In some cases, they are also unprepared to occupy the role; they are in jeopardy or else the circumstances of their motherhood run afoul of certain proprieties.

Esch’s pregnancy isn’t easy. It may also be hard for readers to accept: Esch is in dire financial straits and young enough to scandalize some of us. Does the prospect of her motherhood elicit the same empathy as Lizzie’s or Candace’s? Whose children do we think of as the hope for the future when the end is nigh? Which mothers are most valued in the collective perception? Not, generally speaking, an impoverished Black girl barely into her teens.

Ward’s concerns are with those who will bear the brunt of the coming storms, both natural and metaphoric, on the page and in the world. Esch and her family face Katrina with nothing besides a few canned goods they’ve scared up, and some plywood nailed over the doors and windows. Esch herself is the sort of vulnerable person Scripture might refer to as “the least of these.” Each time I read the novel, my mind leaps to the biblical Mary, mother of Jesus, a poor, brown, teenage girl who gave birth in a barn because no safer provision was made for her. In that story, the life least protected turns out to be the most essential.

So it is in “Salvage the Bones”: Esch and her unborn child, along with fighting China and her puppies, are the beating heart of this universe. Here, Esch considers which animals flee before a coming storm: “Maybe the bigger animals do,” she reflects. “Maybe the small don’t run. Maybe the small pause on their branches, the pine-lined earth, nose up, catch that coming storm air that would smell like salt to them, like salt and clean burning fire, and they prepare like us.”

With “the small,” or those treated as such, as focal points, Ward’s novel is also an indictment. It’s true that Katrina was a natural disaster, but its effects were preventable, or might have been mitigated. Most of us remember the levees breaking. The disaster’s aftermath — thousands, mostly poor, stranded without food or water; critically ill patients dying in storm-ravaged hospitals ; desperate, unarmed civilians shot by police officers — was entirely the fault of humans.

We might extend Ward’s insight to end-time crises in general, in which other Esches are similarly left with the greater share of suffering. We may not be able to reverse the crises themselves, but we can intervene in the devastation they cause, and to whom.

We have been down a harrowing road; there isn’t much comfort here. But perhaps at this critical juncture in our human story, it is not comfort that will aid us most. Perhaps what will aid us most is to enter more fully into dis comfort. To awaken to our grief, like Candace. To try to tear through the veil, like Lizzie. In this way we might begin to believe that the future is not foreclosed upon, whatever it might look like.

I leave us with Esch’s declaration of hope at the end of Ward’s novel. Esch’s family has survived, but Skeetah is searching for China, who disappeared in the storm: “He will look into the future and see her emerge into the circle of his fire, beaten dirty by the hurricane so she doesn’t gleam anymore … dull but alive, alive, alive.”

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Stephen Breyer to the Supreme Court Majority: You’re Doing It Wrong

By Louis Menand

One day in 1993, Stephen Breyer , then the chief judge of the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, which sits in Boston, was riding his bicycle in Harvard Square when he was hit by a car. He was taken to Mount Auburn Hospital with broken ribs and a punctured lung. While he was recovering, he was visited by three White House officials. They had flown up to interview him for a possible nomination to the United States Supreme Court.

The vetting went well enough, and Breyer was invited to Washington to meet the President, Bill Clinton . Breyer’s doctors advised against flying, so he took the train, in some discomfort. The meeting with Clinton did not go well. According to Jeffrey Toobin’s “ The Nine ,” a book about the Supreme Court, Clinton found Breyer “heartless.” “I don’t see enough humanity,” he complained. “I want a judge with soul.” Breyer was told to go home. They would call.

He knew that things had gone poorly. “There’s only two people who aren’t convinced I’m going to be on the Supreme Court,” he told a fellow-judge. “One is me and the other is Clinton.” He was right. The phone never rang. The seat went to Ruth Bader Ginsburg .

Discover notable new fiction and nonfiction.

Ginsburg was a cool customer, too, but she knew which buttons to push. In her interview with Clinton, she talked about the death of her mother and about helping her husband get through law school after he was stricken with testicular cancer. Clinton loved catch-in-the-throat stories like that. Ginsburg was confirmed by the Senate 96–3.

A year went by, there was another Supreme Court vacancy, and Breyer was again in the mix. His candidacy was pushed by Ted Kennedy, with whom he had worked as the chief counsel of the Senate Judiciary Committee when Kennedy was its chair. Clinton really wanted to nominate his Secretary of the Interior, Bruce Babbitt, but Babbitt faced opposition from senators in Western states, and Breyer seemed politically hypoallergenic.

So Breyer was chosen. Still, the White House did not do him any favors. Clinton’s indecisiveness was an ongoing story in the press—it had taken him eighty-six days to pick Ginsburg—and the news coverage made it plain that Breyer was not his first or even his second choice. The White House counsel, Lloyd Cutler, told reporters that, of the candidates being considered, Breyer was “the one with the fewest problems.”

Clinton announced the selection without even waiting for Breyer to come down from Boston. When Breyer did show up, a few days later, he said, “I’m glad I didn’t bring my bicycle down.” Famous last words. In 2011, he broke his collarbone in another biking accident near his home in Cambridge, and in 2013 he fractured his right shoulder and underwent shoulder-replacement surgery after crashing his bicycle near the Korean War Veterans Memorial, on the National Mall. He was seventy-four. You have to give him credit. He gets right back on the horse.

Since his appointment to the Court, Breyer has published several books on his jurisprudential views. His latest is “ Reading the Constitution: Why I Chose Pragmatism, Not Textualism ” (Simon & Schuster). It sums up his frustration with the court that he just stepped down from.

Clinton was not the only person who read Breyer as a technocrat. People felt he lacked a quality that Clinton could apparently summon at will—empathy. “He’s always been smarter than most of those around him,” the Yale constitutional-law professor Akhil Amar explained to a reporter, “so he’s had to learn how to get along with other people.”

That was his reputation at Harvard Law School, too, where he taught administrative law for many years before becoming a judge. “Breyer’s basic social instincts are conservative,” a Harvard colleague, Morton Horwitz, told the Times . “His legal culture is more liberal, and his very flexible pragmatism will enable him to give things a gentle spin in a liberal direction. But he’s a person without deep roots of any kind. He won’t develop a vision. . . . The words ‘social justice’ would somewhat embarrass him.”

It’s true that Breyer has a professorial presentation. He is cosmopolitan and erudite. He travels to other countries and is interested in their legal systems; reporters like to drop the fact that he has read “À la Recherche du Temps Perdu,” in French, twice. He is also, for a judge, relatively wealthy. His wife, Joanna Hare, a clinical psychologist at Dana-Farber, is the daughter of an English viscount.

Before joining the Court, Breyer showed few signs of being a social-justice warrior. He has, like the President who appointed him, neoliberal inclinations. He was instrumental in creating sentencing guidelines for federal judges that he later conceded were too rigid. He wrote a book on regulatory reform. And one of his proudest legislative achievements was working with Kennedy to deregulate the airline industry.

But he has an admirable temperament. Toobin called him “the sunniest individual to serve on the Supreme Court in a great many years.” Seated on a bench next to a lot of intellectual loners— Antonin Scalia , Clarence Thomas , David Souter , Ginsburg herself—Breyer became a consensus seeker, if not always a consensus builder. He believed in reasoned discourse.

He had also learned, from watching Kennedy do business in the Senate, that compromise is how you get things done in government, and he understood that on an ideologically divided court the power is in the middle. Being a split-the-difference centrist, like his predecessor Lewis Powell, and like the Justice he was closest to, Sandra Day O’Connor , suited his personality, too.

Breyer loved the job and was reluctant to announce his retirement, throwing liberals who feared another R.B.G. fiasco into a panic. He stepped down at the end of the 2021-22 term, in time for President Joe Biden to put one of Breyer’s former clerks, Ketanji Brown Jackson , on the Court. Breyer is now back where he started, as a professor of administrative law at Harvard. Happily for the law school, there are now many dedicated bike lanes in Cambridge.

Horwitz was not entirely right about what George H. W. Bush called “the vision thing.” Beneath Breyer’s pragmatic, let-us-reason-together persona is the soul of a Warren Court liberal. The Warren Court is where Breyer’s judicial career began. After graduating from Harvard Law School, in 1964, he clerked for Justice Arthur Goldberg. It was, he said, “a court with a mission.” The mission was to realize the promise of Brown v. Board of Education.

Brown is Breyer’s touchstone. He calls the decision “an affirmation of justice itself.” Brown was decided in 1954, and it governs only segregation in public schools. This is because the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of “the equal protection of the laws,” the right under which Brown was decided, is a right that can be exercised only against states and their agencies. But Breyer understands Brown in a broader sense. He believes that the reasoning in Brown leads to the condemnation of any and all discrimination that is within the reach of government to eliminate.

Extending the spirit of Brown is what the 1964 Civil Rights Act was designed to do. The act was signed into law in July, just as Breyer was beginning his clerkship, and it did something that Congress had tried once before, in 1875: make it unlawful for public accommodations like hotels, theatres, and restaurants to discriminate on the basis of race. In 1883, in a blockbuster decision, the Supreme Court had thrown out that earlier act as unconstitutional. It ruled that the government cannot tell private parties whom they must serve.

Title II of the Civil Rights Act once again prohibited discrimination in public accommodations on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin. But how are privately owned businesses like restaurants within the reach of the state? In October, 1964, three months after the act was signed into law, that question came before the Court in two challenges to the constitutionality of Title II: Heart of Atlanta Motel v. U.S., concerning a motel in Georgia that refused to serve Black travellers, and Katzenbach v. McClung, concerning a restaurant in Birmingham, Ollie’s Barbecue, that refused to seat Black customers. (They could use a takeout window.)

The Court ruled that Congress gets its power to ban discrimination in public accommodations from the commerce clause in Article I of the Constitution. (“Congress shall have power . . . to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.”) This holding required the Court to find that the Heart of Atlanta Motel and Ollie’s Barbecue were, in fact, part of interstate commerce. And the Court so found.

Since the motel was patronized by people travelling from one state to another, and since the ingredients for some of the food served at Ollie’s came from outside Alabama, the Court held that the motel and the restaurant were part of commerce “among the several states” and therefore within the power of Congress to regulate. The Court declared the 1883 ruling “inapposite and without precedential value,” and the decision in both cases was unanimous. Breyer thinks that they were the most important rulings of his clerkship.

There was another case with far-reaching effects that was decided during Breyer’s clerkship: Griswold v. Connecticut. The plaintiffs, Estelle Griswold and C. Lee Buxton, opened a Planned Parenthood clinic in New Haven and were arrested for counselling married couples about birth-control devices, which were illegal under the state’s anti-contraception law. Griswold and Buxton argued that, since the law was unconstitutional, they could not be prosecuted for advising women to break it. In a 7–2 decision, the Court agreed. What constitutional provision did the Connecticut law violate? The right to privacy.

Justice William O. Douglas wrote the opinion of the Court, and it is a classic of judicial inventiveness. Nowhere does the Constitution mention a right to privacy, but Douglas proposed that “specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance.” By this jurisprudential alchemy, the First, Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Ninth Amendments could be interpreted as defining a “zone of privacy” whose penumbra would extend to the marital bedroom.

Douglas concluded his opinion with an encomium to marriage. He got quite worked up about it. “Marriage is a coming together for better or for worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred,” he wrote. “It is an association that promotes a way of life, not causes; a harmony in living, not political faiths; a bilateral loyalty, not commercial or social projects. Yet it is an association for as noble a purpose as any involved in our prior decisions.” Douglas was sixty-six. A year after Griswold, he divorced his twenty-six-year-old third wife, Joan Martin, to marry Cathleen Heffernan, who was twenty-two.

Griswold became a key precedent in two landmark cases: Roe v. Wade, decided in 1973, and Obergefell v. Hodges, the same-sex-marriage case, decided in 2015. “The right of privacy,” Harry Blackmun wrote for the Court in Roe, “is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.” In Obergefell, Anthony Kennedy, also writing for the Court, quoted Douglas’s reflections on marriage in their entirety and added some emanations of his own. In addition to a privacy right, he declared, constitutional liberties extend “to certain personal choices central to individual dignity and autonomy, including intimate choices that define personal identity and beliefs.” (In a dissent, Scalia said that he would “hide my head in a bag” before putting his name to some of Kennedy’s prose.)

The shape of Breyer’s Supreme Court career therefore has an emblematic significance, because it was bookended by two decisions that undid much of what the Warren Court achieved in Heart of Atlanta and Griswold. Breyer’s first major dissent came in 1995, in U.S. v. Lopez, a commerce-clause case; his last was in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Organization, the decision that overturned Roe v. Wade .

Lopez turned on the constitutionality of the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990, which made it a federal crime to possess a firearm in a school zone. In a 5–4 decision, the Court rejected the government’s argument that the act was a legitimate exercise of Congress’s power under the commerce clause. It was the first time since 1936 that the Court had struck down a federal law for exceeding the commerce-clause power.

Much of the New Deal was made possible by the commerce clause. In his dissent, Breyer noted that more than a hundred federal laws include the phrase “affecting commerce.” How many was the Court bent on invalidating? Some, anyway. Five years later, in U.S. v. Morrison, the Court threw out provisions of the Violence Against Women Act on the ground of commerce-clause overreach.

Breyer’s dissent in Dobbs, in 2022, was joined by Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor . The privacy right in Roe “does not stand alone,” they wrote. “The Court has linked it for decades to other settled freedoms involving bodily integrity, familial relationships, and procreation. Most obviously, the right to terminate a pregnancy arose straight out of the right to purchase and use contraception. . . . They are all part of the same constitutional fabric.” They wondered, again, how much the Court was prepared to unravel. In his concurrence, Thomas suggested that the Court might want to reconsider Griswold and Obergefell.

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What happened? Breyer has an explanation, and he lays it out in the new book. He thinks it’s all a matter of interpretation.

As Breyer points out, a majority of the Court now subscribes to the interpretive methods known as textualism and originalism. Textualism and originalism tend to be run together as types of what used to be called “strict construction” (a term that seems to have fallen out of use). But there is a difference. Textualism is primarily a way of interpreting statutes, and originalism is a way of interpreting the Constitution.

Textualists ask what the words of a statute literally mean. Information like legislative history or social-science data is largely irrelevant. Textualists don’t ask, “What would Congress have us do?” They just say, “What is the rule here?” and try to follow it.

Originalists, on the other hand, ask what the Framers would have them do. Originalists can consult the records of the Constitutional Convention (which are hardly comprehensive) and documents like the Federalist Papers (which is a collection of op-eds). But they claim to stick to the “original public understanding” of constitutional language—that is, what the words meant to the average voter in the eighteenth century. They do not invent rights that the Framers would not have recognized, as originalists think Douglas did in Griswold.

More recently, originalists have looked to something called “history and tradition,” highly malleable terms—whose history? which tradition?—by which they tend to mean things as they were prior to circa 1964. Writing for the Court in Dobbs, Samuel Alito explained that the decision turned on “whether the right at issue in this case is rooted in our Nation’s history and tradition.” The constitutional right to abortion was then fifty years old. For women likely to rely on it, the right had existed for their entire lifetimes. But what mattered to the originalists was whether women could rely on it in the nineteenth century.

The use of race as a plus factor in college and university admissions is even older. The practice dates from the late nineteen-sixties, and has been ruled constitutional by the Supreme Court three times: in 1978, in 2003, and in 2016. But the majority had little trouble wiping it out last term, in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard . It is a bit brazen to be shouldering aside precedents under the banner of “tradition.”

Breyer sums up textualism and originalism as attempts to make judicial reasoning a science and to make law a list of rules. In our system of government, the Constitution is the big trump card. But it doesn’t come with a user manual. The document is basically a list of clauses—the commerce clause (sixteen words), the equal-protection clause (fourteen words), and so on. And the Constitution gives the reason for a clause only twice: in the patent-and-copyright clause in Article I and in the right-to-bear-arms clause in the Second Amendment. (We could add the preamble, the “We the People” clause, which gives the rationale for having a written constitution in the first place, a novel idea in 1787.)

Some constitutional clauses, like the requirement that the President be native-born, are rules, but many, like the equal-protection clause (the only reference to equality in the entire document), are principles. They do not mark out bright lines separating the constitutionally permitted from the constitutionally forbidden.

Courts, however, are obliged to draw those lines. Judges cannot conclude that the law is a gray area. Textualists and originalists believe that their approach draws the line at the right place. Breyer thinks that the idea that there is a single right place, good for all time, is a delusion, and that his approach, which he calls “pragmatism,” is the one best suited to the design of the American legal system. Pragmatism makes the system “workable” (a word Breyer uses many times) because it does not box us into rigid doctrines and anachronistic meanings.

Pragmatist judges therefore look to the law’s purposes, consequences, and values. They ask, “Why did the lawmakers write this? What are the real-world consequences for the way the Court interprets it? And what are the values that subtend the system of government that courts are a part of?” These are questions that literal readings can’t answer.

An originalist like Scalia, for example, thinks that the “cruel and unusual punishment” clause in the Eighth Amendment makes unconstitutional only punishments that would have been considered cruel and unusual in 1791, the year the amendment was ratified. In 1791, people were sentenced to death for theft. If we said that seems cruel and unusual today, Scalia would say, “Fine. Pass a law against it. But the Constitution does not forbid it.” When he was asked what punishment the Framers would have considered cruel and unusual, Scalia said, “Thumbscrews.”

To this, a pragmatist judge would say, “Then what is the point of having a constitution?” The words “cruel and unusual” were chosen by the Framers (in this case, James Madison, who drafted the Bill of Rights) because their meanings are not fixed. And that goes to the purpose of the clause. The Constitution does not prohibit cruel and unusual punishment because cruelty is bad and we’re against it. It prohibits punishment that most people would find excessive in order to preserve the public’s faith in the criminal-justice system. If we started executing people for stealing a loaf of bread today, the system would lose its legitimacy. Surely an originalist would agree that the Framers were big on legitimacy.

The same is true of many other clauses—for example, the free-speech clause in the First Amendment. Free speech is protected not because it’s a God-given right. It’s protected because, in a democracy, if you do not allow the losers to have their say, you cannot expect them to submit to the will of the winners. Free speech legitimizes majoritarian rule.

Breyer’s book is organized as a series of analyses of some twenty Supreme Court cases, most of which Breyer took part in during his time on the Court. Some are major cases, like District of Columbia v. Heller, in which the originalists found a right to possess a gun for self-defense in the Second Amendment, which says nothing about self-defense. (“Some have made the argument, bordering on the frivolous, that only those arms in existence in the eighteenth century are protected by the Second Amendment,” Scalia wrote in the Court’s opinion. Hmm. What happened to the Thumbscrews Doctrine?)

Other cases are perhaps less than major, like Return Mail, Inc. v. United States Postal Service, which answered the question of whether the federal government is a “person” capable of petitioning the Patent Trial and Appeal Board under the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act. (It is not.) Breyer explains how originalists and textualists decided each case and how he, as a pragmatist, decided them. His book is accessible, rather repetitive, and neither theoretical nor technical. It is addressed to non-lawyers.

It also seems weirdly naïve. Or maybe purposefully naïve. In most of the cases Breyer discusses, where there was disagreement on the Court it resulted not from differences in interpretive methods but from differences in politics. In almost every case, the originalists and textualists came down on the conservative side, restricting the powers of the federal government and expanding the powers of the states, and the pragmatists and “living constitutionalists” (another term that’s now largely avoided) came down on the liberal side.

What is naïve is to believe that the conservative Justices—which means, on the current Court, the six Justices appointed by Republican Presidents, though they are not always on the same page—would decide cases differently if they switched to another method of interpretation. Judicial reasoning doesn’t work that way. Judges pretty much know where they want to come out, and then they figure out a juridically respectable way of getting there.

Why would Breyer want to ignore, or seriously understate, the part that political ideology plays in Supreme Court decisions? The answer lies in an earlier book, “ The Authority of the Court and the Peril of Politics ,” based on a lecture he delivered at Harvard in 2021. It’s all about legitimacy.

Legitimacy is why the Warren Court was on a mission in 1964. The Supreme Court’s reputation—you could say its mystique—is all that it has. It cannot tax or spend. Only Congress can do those things, and only the President can send in the Army. When Southern school districts ignored Brown and refused to integrate, the Court was in danger of being exposed as a paper tiger. It was crucial, therefore, that everyone believe that the Justices were not making law, only finding it. The Constitution made them do it. That was the Court’s claim to legitimacy.

Breyer thinks that the Court still operates this way. All Justices, he says in “The Authority of the Court,” “studiously try to avoid deciding a case on the basis of ideology rather than law.” The reason that “different political groups so strongly support some persons for appointment to the Court and so strongly oppose others” is that people “confuse perceived personal ideology (inferred from party affiliation or that of the nominating executive) and professed judicial philosophy.”

But Presidents and Senate majorities certainly think they are appointing Justices who share their political beliefs, even when they profess to be simply looking for the most qualified jurist. Sometimes Presidents are wrong. Earl Warren, appointed by Dwight D. Eisenhower, no enthusiast of race-mixing, is a famous example. But that is not because Warren was apolitical. Warren was a Republican politician. He had been elected governor of California three times and had run for Vice-President on the ticket with Thomas E. Dewey, in 1948. For Warren, the political constituency that mattered when he became Chief Justice was not the President or Congress. It was the public.

He could see that, in the postwar era, public opinion was likely to favor expanded liberties—the United States was presenting itself, after all, as the leader of the free world—and although his court may sometimes have got a few paces ahead of public opinion, it was largely in step with the times. It was a liberal era. We are not living in a liberal era anymore, and the Court reflects this.

Politics is the art of governance. The Supreme Court is a branch of government, and is therefore a political body. Its decisions affect public life. If by “political” we mean “partisan,” we are still talking about governance, because partisanship is loyalty to a political ideology, normally instantiated in a political party. Politics, therefore, cannot not be partisan. Partisanship is how politics works. Even when politicians say, “This is no time for politics,” they are saying it for partisan reasons. They are saying it because it is good for their side to say it.

What makes the Court different from other political actors is stare decisis, the tradition of respecting its earlier decisions, something Congress does not have to worry about. There is no rule against overturning a precedent, though. So why has the Court been traditionally reluctant to do so? Why does Thomas’s suggestion that it might be time to overrule Griswold and Obergefell seem so radical? It’s because the Court’s legitimacy is intimately tied to the perception that, in making its rulings, it looks only to what the Constitution says and what the Court has previously decided. When the Court overturns a case, it has to make it appear as though the decision was wrong as a matter of law.

This is why Breyer insists that it’s all a matter of legal forensics, of what interpretive lenses the Justices use. He wants to preserve the authority of the Court. He wants to prevent the Justices from being seen as the puppets of politicians.

His toughest moment on the Court, for this reason, must have been Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District, decided in 2007. In that case, the Court struck down a Seattle policy of using race as a factor in assigning students to high schools with the aim of attaining rough racial balance.

It was the kind of policy that the Court had approved a number of times since Brown. Now, in an opinion by John Roberts, the Court declared that it had had enough. Roberts ended with a memorable line, no doubt saved up for the right occasion: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

After Roberts announced the Court’s opinion, on the last day of the term, Breyer delivered a speech from the bench. “Bristling with barely concealed anger,” according to an account by the legal scholar Lani Guinier, he accused the Court’s Republican appointees of voting their policy preferences. “It is not often in the law that so few have so quickly changed so much,” he said.

In 2019, Breyer’s speech from the bench was published as a pamphlet by Brookings. The title he gave it was “Breaking the Promise of Brown.” ♦

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Donald Trump and Megan Mullally performing the Green Acres theme song at the Emmy Awards, Los Angeles, September 2005

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In the Warsaw Ghetto in October 1941 Mary Berg, then a teenager, wrote in her diary about the improbable persistence of laughter in that hellish place:

Every day at the Art Café on Leszno Street one can hear songs and satires on the police, the ambulance service, the rickshaws, and even the Gestapo, in a veiled fashion. The typhus epidemic itself is the subject of jokes. It is laughter through tears, but it is laughter. This is our only weapon in the ghetto—our people laugh at death and at the Nazi decrees. Humor is the only thing the Nazis cannot understand.

Berg here movingly expresses a common and comforting idea. Laughter is one of the few weapons that the weak have against the strong. Gallows humor is the one thing that cannot be taken away from those who are about to be hanged, the final death-defying assertion of human dignity and freedom. And the hangmen don’t get the jokes. Fascists don’t understand humor.

There is great consolation in these thoughts. Yet is it really true that fascists don’t get humor? Racist, misogynistic, antisemitic, xenophobic, antidisabled, and antiqueer jokes have always been used to dehumanize those who are being victimized. The ghetto humor that Berg recorded was a way of keeping self-pity at bay. But as Sigmund Freud pointed out, jokes can also be a way of shutting down pity itself by identifying those who are being laughed at as the ones not worthy of it: “A saving in pity is one of the most frequent sources of humorous pleasure.” Humor, as in Berg’s description, may be a way of telling us not to feel sorry for ourselves. But it is more often a way of telling us not to feel sorry for others. It creates an economy of compassion, limiting it to those who are laughing and excluding those who are being laughed at. It makes the polarization of humanity fun.

Around the time that Berg was writing her diary, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer were pointing to the relationship between Nazi rallies and this kind of comedy. The rally, they suggested, was an arena in which a release that was otherwise forbidden was officially permitted:

The anti-Semites gather to celebrate the moment when authority lifts the ban; that moment alone makes them a collective, constituting the community of kindred spirits. Their ranting is organized laughter. The more dreadful the accusations and threats, the greater the fury, the more withering is the scorn. Rage, mockery, and poisoned imitation are fundamentally the same thing.

Donald Trump is not a Nazi, and his followers are (mostly) not fascists. But it is not hard to see how this description resonates with his campaign appearances. Trump is America’s biggest comedian. His badinage is hardly Wildean, but his put-downs, honed to the sharpness of stilettos, are many people’s idea of fun. For them, he makes anger, fear, and resentment entertaining.

For anyone who questions how much talent and charisma this requires, there is a simple answer: Ron DeSantis. Why did DeSantis’s attempt to appeal to Republican voters as a straitlaced version of Trump fall so flat? Because Trumpism without the cruel laughter is nothing. It needs its creator’s fusion of rage, mockery, and poisoned imitation, whether of a reporter with a disability or (in a dumb show that Trump has been playing out in his speeches in recent months) of Joe Biden apparently unable to find his way off a stage. It demands the withering scorn for Sleepy Joe and Crooked Hillary, Crazy Liz and Ron DeSanctimonious, Cryin’ Chuck and Phoney Fani. It requires the lifting of taboos to create a community of kindred spirits. It depends on Trump’s ability to be pitiless in his ridicule of the targets of his contempt while allowing his audience to feel deeply sorry for itself. (If tragedy, as Aristotle claimed, involves terror and pity, Trump’s tragicomedy deals in terror and self-pity.)

Hard as it is to understand, especially for those of us who are too terrified to be amused, Trump’s ranting is organized laughter. To understand his continuing hold over his fans, we have to ask: Why is he funny?

This is not the 1930s or the 1940s, and we should not expect this toxic laughter to be organized quite as it was then. Trump functions in a culture supersaturated with knowingness and irony. In twentieth-century European fascism, the relationship between words and actions was clear: the end point of mockery was annihilation. Now, the joke is “only a joke.” Populist politics exploits the doubleness of comedy—the way that “only a joke” can so easily become “no joke”—to create a relationship of active connivance between the leader and his followers in which everything is permissible because nothing is serious.

This shift has happened in Europe, too. Think of Boris Johnson’s clown act, his deliberately ruffled hair, rumpled clothes, and ludicrous language. Or think of Giorgia Meloni, the first Italian prime minister from the far right since Benito Mussolini, posting on election day in September 2022 a TikTok video of herself holding two large melons ( meloni in Italian) in front of her breasts: fascism as adolescent snigger. It is impossible to think of previous far-right leaders engaging in such public self-mockery. Only in our time is it possible for a politician to create a sense of cultlike authority by using the collusiveness of comedy, the idea that the leader and his followers are united by being in on the joke.

Trump may be a narcissist, but he has a long history of this kind of self-caricature. When he did the Top Ten List on the David Letterman show in 2009, he seemed entirely comfortable delivering with a knowing smirk the top ten “financial tips” written for him, including “When nobody’s watching I go into a 7/11 and stick my head under a soda nozzle”; “Save money by styling your own hair” (pointing to his own improbable coiffure); “Sell North Dakota to the Chinese”; “If all else fails, steal someone’s identity”; and “The fastest way to get rich: marry and divorce me.” This performance, moreover, was the occasion for Trump’s entry into the world of social media. His first ever tweet was: “Be sure to tune in and watch Donald Trump on Late Night with David Letterman as he presents the Top Ten List tonight!”

At the 2005 Emmy Awards, Trump dressed in blue overalls and a straw hat and, brandishing a pitchfork, sang the theme song from the 1960s TV comedy Green Acres . Trump is a terrible singer and a worse actor, but he seemed completely unembarrassed on stage. He understood the joke: that Oliver, the fictional character he was impersonating, is a wealthy Manhattanite who moves to rustic Hooterville to run a farm, following his dream of the simple life—an alternative self that was amusing because it was, for Trump, unimaginable. But he may have sensed that there was also a deep cultural resonance. The Apprentice was “reality TV ,” a form in which the actual and the fictional are completely fused.

Green Acres , scenes from which played on a screen behind Trump as he was singing, pioneered this kind of metatelevision. Its debut episode set it up as a supposed documentary presented by a well-known former newscaster. Its characters regularly broke the fourth wall. When Oliver launched into rhapsodic speeches about American rural values, a fife rendition of “Yankee Doodle” would play on the soundtrack, and the other characters would move around in puzzlement trying to figure out where the musician was. Eva Gabor, playing Oliver’s pampered wife, admits on the show that her only real talent is doing impressions of Zsa Zsa Gabor, the actor’s more famous real-life sister.

The critic Armond White wrote in 1985 that “ Green Acres ’ surreal rationale is to capture the moment American gothic turns American comic.” Trump playing Oliver in 2005 may be the moment American comedy turned gothic again. Whoever had the idea of connecting Trump back to Green Acres clearly understood that “Donald Trump” had by then also become a metatelevision character, a real-life failed businessman who impersonated an ultrasuccessful mogul on The Apprentice . And Trump went along with the conceit because he instinctively understood that self-parody was not a threat to his image—it was his image. This connection to Green Acres was reestablished by Trump himself as president of the United States. In December 2018, as he was about to sign the Farm Bill into law, Trump tweeted, “Farm Bill signing in 15 minutes! #Emmys #TBT,” with a clip of himself in the Green Acres spoof. Hooterville and the White House were as one.

What is new in the development of antidemocratic politics is that Trump brings all this comic doubleness—the confusion of the real and the performative, of character and caricature—to bear on the authoritarian persona of the caudillo, the duce, the strongman savior. The prototype dictators of the far right may have looked absurd to their critics (“Hitler,” wrote Adorno and Horkheimer, “can gesticulate like a clown, Mussolini risk false notes like a provincial tenor”), but within the community of their followers and the shadow community of their intended victims, their histrionics had to be taken entirely seriously. Trump, on the other hand, retains all his self-aware absurdity even while creating a political persona of immense consequence.

This comic-authoritarian politics has some advantages over the older dictatorial style. It allows a threat to democracy to appear as at worst a tasteless prank: in the 2016 presidential campaign even liberal outlets like The New York Times took Hillary Clinton’s e-mails far more seriously than Trump’s open stirring of hatred against Mexicans and Muslims. Funny-autocratic functions better in a society like that of the US, where the boundaries of acceptable insult are still shifting and mainstream hate-mongering still has to be light on its feet. It allows racial insults and brazen lies to be issued, as it were, in inverted commas. If you don’t see those invisible quotation marks, you are not smart enough—or you are too deeply infected by the woke mind virus—to be in on the joke. You are not part of the laughing community. The importance of not being earnest is that it defines the boundaries of the tribe. The earnest are the enemy.

The extreme right in America was very quick to understand the potency of “only a joke” in the Internet age. In a 2001 study of three hate speech websites sympathetic to the Ku Klux Klan, Michael Billig noted that each of them described itself on its home page as a humorous exercise. The largest, called “N…..jokes KKK ” (the ellipsis is mine) carried the disclaimers: “You agree by entering this site, that this type of joke is legal where you live, and you agree that you recognize this site is meant as a joke not to be taken seriously”; “And you agree that this site is a comedy site, not a real racist site”; “We ARE NOT real life racists.”

What does “real life” even mean when Klansmen are not really racist? The power of this “humorous” mode of discourse lies at least partly in the way it blurs the distinctions between the real and the symbolic, and between words and actions. Consider the example of some of the men tried for their alleged parts in a 2020 plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic governor of Michigan. One of them, Barry Croft, insisted at his trial in 2022 that he was joking most of the time when he posted on Facebook questions like “Which governor is going to end up being dragged off and hung for treason first?” Another, Brandon Caserta, was acquitted in 2022 in part because he successfully pleaded that violent statements he made on Facebook and in secretly recorded meetings of the group were not serious. These included claims that the Second Amendment sanctions the killing of “agents of the government when they become tyrannical.” “I may kill dozens of agents but eventually die in the process,” Caserta wrote on Facebook in May 2020. He later posted that he would beat government agents so hard they would “beg til they couldn’t beg any more because their mouth is so full of blood.”

At Croft’s trial, his defense attorney put it to an FBI witness that a meme Croft posted showing thirty bullets as “30 votes that count” was “A little tongue-in-cheek? A little bit funny?” On the second season of Jon Ronson’s superb podcast series for the BBC , Things Fell Apart , Caserta acknowledges that, on the secret recordings, he is heard to urge his fellow militia members that any lawyers advocating for the Covid vaccine be decapitated in their own homes, speaks of “wanting Zionist banker blood,” and advocates blowing up buildings where the vaccine is manufactured. He nonetheless insists to Ronson:

This isn’t something I’m dead serious about. This is nothing I ever planned. It’s funny, dude! It’s funny! It’s fun to blow stuff up. It’s fun to shoot guns. It’s fun to say ridiculous offensive shit. And if it offends you, so what? I don’t care about your feelings and how you feel about words. Sorry!

The twist of logic here is striking: Caserta equates blowing stuff up and shooting people with saying ridiculous offensive shit. Violent words and violent actions are all covered by the same disclaimer—one that Trump’s apologists use to blur the relationship between his words and his followers’ actions in the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. In the Trumpian twilight zone where democracy is dying but not yet dead, the connection between words (“fight like hell”) and deeds (the armed invasion of the Capitol) must be both strong and weak, sufficiently “no joke” to be understood by the faithful yet sufficiently “only a joke” to be deniable to the infidels. The comic mode is what creates the plausible deniability that in turn allows what used to be mainstream Republicans (and some Democrats) to remain in denial about what Trumpism really means.

For those who love Trump, there is something carnivalesque in all of this. In his discussion of “mediaeval laughter” in Rabelais and His World , Mikhail Bakhtin wrote that “one might say that it builds its own world versus the official world, its own church versus the official church, its own state versus the official state.” Bakhtin suggested that the

festive liberation of laughter…was a temporary suspension of the entire official system with all its prohibitions and hierarchic barriers. For a short time life came out of its usual, legalized and consecrated furrows and entered the sphere of utopian freedom.

Trump and many of his followers have made this quite literal. They create their own America, their own republic, their own notions of legality, their own church of the leader’s cult, their own state versus what they see as the official state. In this way, extreme polarization becomes a sphere of utopian freedom.

This is the capacious zone in which Trump’s comedy operates, an arena that admits everyone who gets the joke, from those who fantasize about killing tyrants, decapitating lawyers, and torturing government agents to those who just like to blow off steam by listening to their hero saying stuff that riles the woke enemy. It is crucial that in Trump’s delivery there is no shift from mockery to seriousness, no line between entertainment and violence. His singsong tone is generous and flexible, serving equally well for vaudeville and vituperation. In his streams of consciousness, they flow together as complementary currents.

In the recent speeches in which he has upped the ante on openly fascist rhetoric by characterizing his opponents as “vermin” and accusing immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country,” it is notable that his cadence is soft, almost lilting. There is no warning to his audience that these comments are of a different order. They are not even applause lines. By underplaying them, Trump leaves open the fundamental question: Is his mimicking of Hitler’s imagery just another impersonation, all of a piece with the way he does Biden and Haley in funny voices or even with the way he sings the theme song from Green Acres ?

Even when Trump actually goes the whole way and acknowledges that his rhetoric is indeed Hitlerian, as he did in a speech in Iowa after the alarmed reaction of liberals to his previous “poisoning the blood” speech, it is in a passage that jumbles together murderous intent, complaint about the media, and comic acting: “They are destroying the blood of our country. That’s what they’re doing…. They don’t like it when I said that. And I never read Mein Kampf .” But he makes the “Kampf” funny, puckering his lips and elongating the “pf” so it sounds like a rude noise. He continues: “They said ‘Oh, Hitler said that.’” Then he adds his defense: “in a much different way.” It is the stand-up comedian’s credo: it’s not the jokes, it’s the way you tell ’em. And this is, indeed, true—the difference is in the way he tells it, in a voice whose ambiguous pitch has been perfected over many years of performance.

The knowingness is all. In the speech in Conway, South Carolina, on February 10, in which he openly encouraged Russia to attack “delinquent” members of NATO , this startling statement, with potential world-historical consequences, was preceded by Trump’s metatheatrical riff on the idea of “fun.” What was fun, he told his followers, was the reaction he could provoke just by saying “Barack Hussein Obama”:

Every time I say it, anytime I want to have a little fun…even though the country is going to hell, we have to have a little bit of fun…. Remember Rush Limbaugh, he’d go “Barack Hooosaynn Obama”—I wonder what he was getting at.

He then segued into another commentary on his own well-honed send-up of Joe Biden: “I do the imitation where Biden can’t find his way off the stage…. So I do the imitation—is this fun?—I say this guy can’t put two sentences together…and then I go ‘Watch!’” (He said the word with a comic pout.) “I’ll imitate him. I go like this: ‘Haw!’” Trump hunches his shoulders and extends his arm, in a parody of Biden’s gestures. In this burlesque, Trump is not just mimicking his opponent; he is explicitly reenacting his own previous mocking impersonation, complete with commentary. He is simultaneously speaking, acting, and speaking about his acting.

It is within this “fun” frame that Trump proceeded to insinuate that there is something awry with Nikki Haley’s marriage: “Where’s her husband? Oh he’s away…. What happened to her husband? What happened to her husband! Where is he? He’s gone. He knew, he knew.” He and presumably many members of the audience were aware that Michael Haley is currently serving in Djibouti with the South Carolina National Guard. But as part of the show, with the funny voices and the exaggerated gestures, that lurid hint at some mysteriously unmentionable scandal (“He knew, he knew”) is somehow amusing. And then so is Trump’s story about telling an unnamed head of a “big” NATO country that the US would not defend it from invasion and—the punch line—that he would “encourage” Russia “to do whatever the hell they want.” Here Trump is acting in both senses, both ostentatiously performing and exerting a real influence on global politics—but which is which? How can we tell the dancer from the dance?

This shuffling in a typical Trump speech of different levels of seriousness—personal grudges beside grave geopolitics, savage venom mixed with knockabout farce, possible truths rubbing up against outrageous lies—creates a force field of incongruities. Between the looming solidity of Trump’s body and the airy, distracted quality of his words, in which weightless notions fly off before they are fully expressed, he seems at once immovable and in manic flux.

Incongruity has long been seen as one of the conditions of comedy. Francis Hutcheson in Reflections Upon Laughter (1725) noted that it is “this contrast or opposition of ideas of dignity and meanness which is the occasion of laughter.” The supposedly dignified idea of “greatness” is vital to Trump’s presence and rhetoric. But it is inextricably intertwined with the mean, the inconsequential, even the infantile. He is at one moment the grandiose man of destiny and the next a naughty child—an incongruity that can be contained only within an organized laughter in which the juxtaposition of incompatibilities is the essence of fun. This is why Trump’s lapses into pure gibberish—like telling a National Rifle Association gathering in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on February 9 that the Democrats are planning to “change the name of Pennsylvania” and that, in relation to the marble columns in the hall, it was “incredible how they could [have been built] years ago without the powerful tractors that you have today”—do not make his fans alarmed about his mental acuity. Cognitive dysfunction is not a worry with a man whose métier is cognitive dissonance.

Part of the dissonance is that Trump’s stand-up routine is completely dependent on the idea that he and his audience most despise: political correctness. Like much of the worst of contemporary comedy, Trump both amuses and thrills his audience by telling them that he is saying what he is not allowed to say. “Beautiful women,” he said at the rally in South Carolina after pointing to a group of female superfans in the audience. “You’re not allowed to say that anymore, but I’ll say it…. That usually is the end of a career, but I’ll say it.” There are so many layers to a moment like this: the idea that the woke mob is stopping manly men from complimenting attractive women, a sideways nod toward the “pussygate” tapes that should have ended Trump’s political career but didn’t, a dig at the Me Too movement, a reiteration of Trump’s right to categorize women as “my type” or “not my type,” the power of the leader to lift prohibitions—not just for himself but, in this carnivalesque arena of utopian freedom, for everyone in the audience.

Flirting with the unsayable has long been part of his shtick. If we go all the way back to May 1992 to watch Trump on Letterman’s show, there is a moment when Trump silently mouths the word “shit.” He does this in a way that must have been practiced rather than spontaneous—it takes some skill to form an unspoken word so clearly for a TV audience that everyone immediately understands it. Letterman plays his straight man: “You ain’t that rich, Don, you can’t come on here and say that.” But of course Trump did not “say” it. A sympathetic audience loves a moment like this because it is invited to do the transgressive part in its head. It gets the pleasure of filling in the blank.

Trump’s audiences, in other words, are not passive. This comedy is a joint enterprise of performer and listener. It gives those listeners the opportunity for consent and collusion. Consider a televised speech Trump gave at the Al Smith Dinner, hosted by the Catholic archbishop of New York, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, in October 2016, near the end of the presidential campaign. The dinner, held to raise money for Catholic charities, is traditionally the last occasion on which the two main presidential candidates share a stage—Hillary Clinton was also present. Trump deadpanned that he knew he would have a receptive audience because “so many of you in the archdiocese already have a place in your heart for a guy who started out as a carpenter working for his father. I was a carpenter working for my father. True.”

What is the joke here? That Trump is like Jesus Christ. Imagine if Clinton had attempted an equivalent gag. There would have been outrage and uproar: Clinton has insulted all Christians by making a blasphemous comparison between herself and the divine Savior. But the cameras cut to Dolan, a sycophantic supporter of Trump, and showed him laughing heartily. And if the cardinal found it funny, it was funny. It was thus an in-joke. If Clinton had made it, it would be the ultimate out-joke, proof of the Democrats’ contempt for people of faith.

But what is allowed as funny will sooner or later be proposed seriously. Many of those attending Trump rallies now wear T-shirts that proclaim “Jesus Is My Savior. Trump Is My President.” Some of them illustrate the slogan with a picture of an ethereal Christ laying both his hands on Trump’s shoulders. What begins as a risqué quip ends up as a religious icon. There is no line here between sacrilege and devotion, transgressive humor and religious veneration.

Just as Trump’s jokes can become literal, his ugly realities can be bathed in the soothing balm of laughter. Long before he ran for president, he was indulged on the late-night talk shows as the hilarious huckster. In 1986 Letterman tried repeatedly to get Trump to tell him how much money he had, and when he continually evaded the question, Letterman broke the tension with the laugh-line, “You act like you’re running for something.” In December 2005 Conan O’Brien asked him, “You also have an online school? Is that correct?” Trump replied, “Trump University—if you want to learn how to get rich.” The audience howled with laughter, presumably not because they thought he was kidding but because the very words “Trump University” are innately absurd. When he did that Top Ten List on Letterman in 2009, Trump’s comic financial advice included “For tip number four, simply send me $29.95.”

But these jokes came true. Trump wouldn’t say how much he was worth because his net worth was partly fictional. Trump did run for something. Trump University was an innately funny idea that people took seriously enough to enable Trump to rip them off. And Trump does want you to send him $29.95—the first thing you get on Trump’s official website is an insistent demand: “Donate Today.” This is the thing about Trump’s form of organized laughter, in which the idea of humor obscures the distinction between outlandish words and real-life actions. Sooner or later, the first becomes the second. The in-joke becomes the killer line.

March 21, 2024

Who Should Regulate Online Speech?

Small Island

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Fintan O’Toole is the Advising Editor at The New York Review and a columnist for The Irish Times. His most recent book, We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland , was published in the US last year. (March 2024)

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