National Book Critics Circle Award - Biography/Autobiography

2008 - Autobiography

Ariel Sabar. My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq

My Father's Paradise is Ariel Sabar's quest to reconcile present and past. As Ariel's father, Yona, travels with him to today's postwar Iraq to find what's left of Yona's birthplace, Ariel brings to life the ancient town of Zakho, telling his family's story and discovering his own role in this sweeping saga. What he finds in the Sephardic Jews' millennia-long survival in Islamic lands is an improbable story of tolerance and hope.

2008 - Biography

Patrick French. The World is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul

In V.S. Naipaul's acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for literature in 2001, he stated, "a book is the product of a different self from the self we manifest in our habits, in our social life, in our vices." This biography authorized by Naipaul, who was interviewed many times by the author, seems to prove this. Naipaul has written with humor and compassion about the disenfranchised of the earth. The portrait that French paints is of a totally self-centered individual who behaved callously toward both his wife and mistress, who has few friends and is essentially a narcissistic misanthrope. French quotes from the many letters, journals and other documents that Naipaul donated to the university library at Tulsa. He has combed them all and found little good to say.

2007 - Autobiography

Edwidge Danticat. Brother, I'm Dying

When the author was only four years old, her parents emigrated from Haiti to New York in search of a better life, leaving their daughter in the care of her uncle Joseph. A peaceful pastor in Port-au-Prince, Joseph raised Edwidge with the love and devotion of a father, despite facing many hardships in politically turbulent Haiti. It wasn't until she was 12 years old that Edwidge was finally reunited with her parents--and forced to confront the inevitably complex emotions.

2007 - Biography

Tim Jeal. Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer

Few have started life as disadvantaged as Stanley. Rejected by both parents and consigned to a Welsh workhouse, he emigrated to America as a penniless eighteen-year-old. Jeal vividly recreates Stanley's rise to success, his friendships and romantic relationships, and his life-changing decision to assume an American identity. Stanley's epic but unfairly forgotten African journeys are thrillingly described, establishing the explorer as the greatest to set foot on the continent. Few biographies can claim so thoroughly to reappraise a reputation; few portray a more extraordinary historical figure.

2006 - Autobiography

Daniel Mendelsohn. The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

In this narrative, a writer's search for the truth behind his family's tragic past in World War II becomes a remarkably original epic - part memoir, part reportage, part mystery, and part scholarly detective work - that explores the nature of time and memory, family and history.

2006 - Biography

Julie Phillips. James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon

A biography of Alice B. Sheldon, who in her 60s wrote science fiction - to acclaim - as James Tiptree, Jr.

2005 - Autobiography

Francine Du Plessix Gray. Them: A Memoir of Parents

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.

 

 

2005 - Biography

 

Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin. American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of Robert J. Oppenheimer

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.

2004

Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan. de Kooning: An American Master

Willem de Kooning is one of the most important artists of the twentieth century, a true "painter's painter" whose protean work continues to inspire many artists. The first major biography of de Kooning captures both the life and work of this complex, romantic figure in American culture.

2003

William Taubman. Khrushchev: the Man and His Era

Drawing on newly opened archives in Russia and Ukraine, Taubman (political science, Amherst College) writes a thorough biography of one of the most complex and important political figures of the 20th century whose life and career spanned revolution, civil war, famine, collectivization, industrialization, terror, world war, the Cold War, Stalinism, and post-Stalinism.

2002

Janet Browne. Charles Darwin: The Power of Place

2001

Adam Sisman. Boswell's Presumptuous Task: The Making of the Life of Samuel Johnson

A heroic, brilliantly detailed portrait of the biographer as artist, "Boswell's Presumptuous Task" shows movingly how a man who failed in almost everything else produced a masterpiece. Sisman traces the friendship between James Boswell and Dr. Samuel Johnson and how Boswell came to write one of the greatest and most entertaining books in the English language.

2000

Herbert Bix. Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan

In this biography of the Japanese emperor Hirohito, Herbert P. Bix offers the first complete, unvarnished look at the enigmatic leader whose sixty-three-year reign ushered Japan into the modern world.

1999

Henry Wieneck. The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White

1998

Sylvia Nasar. A Beautiful Mind

In a masterful blend of biography and science writing, Nasar traces John Forbes Nash, Jr.'s rise to the heights of intellectual achievement and his harrowing descent from "eccentricity" to insanity.

1997

James Tobin. Ernie Pyle's War: America's Eyewitness to World War II

When a machine-gun bullet ended the life of Ernie Pyle in the final days of World War II, the nation mourned this American folk hero. Through his words and compassion, Americans gleaned their understanding of what they carne to call "The Good War." In this engrossing biography James Tobin evokes the life and labors of a man whose love/hate relationship to war mirrors our own. To read it is to know Ernie Pyle, and most of all, to know his war.

1996

Frank McCourt. Angela's Ashes

A beautifully written memoir full of Irish wit and pathos, making it stand out among the garden variety of youthful reminisces. Let's face it, a bad childhood is more interesting and McCourt had it in spades. He was born in Brooklyn, but his family went back to Ireland where he grew up on the dole exacerbated by alcoholism (his father's), near starvation, beatings by the schoolmasters, and a brief respite in clinic where he discovered Shakespeare.

1995

Robert Polito. Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson

Jim Thompson wrote some of the darkest, boldest, and most celebrated modern crime novels, including The Grifters and The Killer Inside Me. In Savage Art, Robert Polito provides the first comprehensive biography of this brilliant American original. Combining exhaustive research with novelistic fluency, Polito reproduces the vital textures of Thompson's world and provides the first thorough chronicle of his private and public history.

1994

Mikal Gilmore. Shot in the Heart

The brother of Gary Gilmore, the convicted and executed killer of The Executioner's Song, chronicles his family's story, tracing the hidden secrets and disappointments, the hatred and the sense of retribution, that shaped his brother's grim life.

1993

Edmund White. Genet

Based on interviews with publishers, lovers, and friends, White provides an intimate, incisive portrait of poet, thief, and controversial artist Jean Genet.

1992

Carol Brightman. Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World

Drawing on a series of interviews with McCarthy, as well as a collection of the author's letters and papers, this biography provides new insights into the life and innovative work of one of America's premier female authors.

1991

Philip Roth. Patrimony

Roth watches as his 86-year-old father--famous for his vigor, charm, and his repertoire of Newark recollections--battles with the brain tumor that will kill him.

1990

Robert A. Caro. Means of Ascent: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol.2

The most important, acclaimed, and galvanizing political biography of our era--which began with The Path to Power--continues in this national bestseller. In Means of Ascent Lyndon Johnson's almost mythic personality is seen at its most nakedly ambitious. The culminating drama--the explosive heart of the book--is Caro's illumination of one of the great political mysteries of the century, the "87 votes that changed history".

1989

Geoffrey C. Ward. A First Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt

This second volume of Ward's work on FDR's early years is not a full-scale political biography, but more a human portrait of his character and personality. Ward begins with Roosevelt's honeymoon and concludes with his return to public life after his ordeal with infantile paralysis.

1988

Richard Ellman. Oscar Wilde

The biography sensitive to the tragic pattern of the story of a great subject: Oscar Wilde - psychologically and sexually complicated, enormously quotable, central to a alluring cultural world and someone whose life assumed an unbearably dramatic shape.

1987

Donald R. Howard. Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World

Revered for centuries as the father of English poetry, Geoffrey Chaucer was also a central man of his age--a courtier, soldier, diplomat, public official, a man of action, and a man of the world. In this award-winning biography, Donald R. Howard recreates the public, private, and poetic life of this extraordinary man.

1986

Theodore Rosengarten. Tombee: Portrait of a Cotton Planter

1985

Leon Edel. Henry James: A Life

An exploration in to the life of writer Henry James.

1984

Joseph Frank. Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal: 1850-1859

1983

Joyce Johnson. Minor Characters

For two years, during the time that On the Road established Jack Kerouac as the spokesman and guiding light of the Beat Generation, Joyce Johnson was his girlfriend. This luminous, lyrical book is the story of that time.