eBranch Blog

March 07, 2006

2005 National Book Critics Circle Awards Winners

The National Book Critics Circle Awards are awarded annually in several categories including fiction. The awards are chosen by the 700+ members.

Fiction

E.L. Doctorow. The March
In 1864, after Union general William Tecumseh Sherman burned Atlanta, he marched his sixty thousand troops east through Georgia to the sea, and then up into the Carolinas. The army fought off Confederate forces and lived off the land, pillaging the Southern plantations, taking cattle and crops for their own, demolishing cities, and accumulating a borne-along population of freed blacks and white refugees until all that remained was the dangerous transient life of the uprooted, the dispossessed, and the triumphant.

Nonfiction

Svetlana Alexievich. Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

Biography/Autobiography

Francine Du Plessix Gray. Them: A Memoir of Parents - Autobiography
Alexander Liberman and Tatiana du Plessix were two extravagantly talented Russian emigres who fled wartime Paris to become New York's first and grandest "power couple." Their life stories spanned the twentieth century, and reflected the sociopolitical complexities at the heart of it. Them: A Memoir of Parents is written by their daughter, Francine de Plessix Gray. In this memoir, she tells the saga of their triumph and decline - a saga that mirrors, and could only have concurred with, the chaos of the last half century.

Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin. American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of Robert J. Oppenheimer - Biography
The first full-scale biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, ?father of the atomic bomb,? the brilliant, charismatic physicist who led the effort to capture the awesome fire of the sun for his country in time of war.

Poetry

Jack Gilbert. Refusing Heaven