National Book Critics Circle Award - General Nonfiction

Submitted by admin on Tue, 05/05/2009 - 11:44am

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

	2008 Dexter Filkins. The Forever War From the front lines of the battle against Islamic fundamentalism, a searing, unforgettable audiobook that captures the human essence of the greatest conflict of our time. Through the eyes of Dexter Filkins, the prize-winning New York Times correspondent, we witness the remarkable chain of events that began with the rise of the Taliban in the 1990s, continued with the attacks of 9/11, and moved on to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
	2007 Harriet A. Washington. Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present Medical Apartheid is the first and only comprehensive history of medical experimentation on African Americans. Starting with the earliest encounters between black Americans and Western medical researchers and the racist pseudoscience that resulted, it details the ways both slaves and freedmen were used in hospitals for experiments conducted without their knowledge - a tradition that continues today within some black populations. It reveals how blacks have historically been prey to grave-robbing as well as unauthorized autopsies and dissections. Moving into the twentieth century, it shows how the pseudoscience of eugenics and social Darwinism was used to justify experimental exploitation and shoddy medical treatment of blacks, and the view that they were biologically inferior, oversexed, and unfit for adult responsibilities. Shocking new details about the government's notorious Tuskegee experiment are revealed, as are similar, less-well-known medical atrocities conducted by the government, the armed forces, prisons, and private institutions.
	2006 Simon Schama. Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution Rough Crossings turns on a single huge question: if you were black in America at the start of the Revolutionary War, whom would you want to win? In response to a declaration by the last governor of Virginia that any rebel-owned slave who escaped and served the King would be emancipated, tens of thousands of slaves - Americans who clung to the sentimental notion of British freedom - escaped from farms, plantations and cities to try to reach the British camp. This mass movement lasted as long as the war did, and a military strategy originally designed to break the plantations of the American South had unleashed one of the great exoduses in American history.
	2005 Svetlana Alexievich. Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster Voices from Chernobyl is the first book to present personal accounts of what happened to the people of Belarus, and the fear, anger, and uncertainty that they still live with. In order to give voice to their experiences, Svetlana Alexievich-a journalist by trade who now suffers from an immune deficiency developed while researching this book-interviewed hundreds of people affected by the meltdown: from innocent citizens, to firefighters, to those called in to clean up the disaster.Voices from Chernobyl is a crucial document of a disaster and how the government has masked its seriousness, making the event even more tragic through deception and lies.
	2004 Diarmaid MacCulloch. The Reformation: A History The Reformation and the Counter-Reformation it provoked are one of the great discontinuities in European and world history. The dramatic changes that began when Martin Luther proclaimed his ninety-five theses in Wittenberg in 1517 were of a different order to anything that had gone before. In the following two hundred years, the Christian world broke apart and the nature not just of religion but also of politics, thought, society and culture all changed utterly.
	2003 Paul Hendrickson. Sons of Mississippi: a Story of Race and It's Legacy This is the story of seven white Mississippi sheriffs immortalized in a horrifically telling 1962 "Life" photograph--and of the racial intolerance that is their legacy. In telling the stories of these men, Hendrickson gives readers an extraordinarily revealing picture of racism in America at that moment.
	2002 Samantha Power. "A Problem From Hell": America and the Age of Genocide Based on her study of various well publicized incidents of genocide during the 20th century, Power (human rights policy, Harvard U.) concludes that Americans are slow to respond to it, and that the battle to generate US government intervention is lost in the realm of domestic politics. She does not mention American Indians.
	2001 Nicholson Baker. Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper A bestselling novelist presents an expos of 20th century library policies that have resulted in the destruction of large parts of the printed past, explaining that the country's greatest libraries have dismantled their collections of original bound newspapers and books and replaced them with microfilmed copies.
	2000 Ted Conover. Newjack: Guarding Sing-Sing This brilliant, unprecedented work of eyewitness journalism by the acclaimed author of "Coyotes" ofers the story of the author's rookie year as a guard at Sing Sing.
	1999 Jonathan Weiner. Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and his Quest for the Origins of Behavior Portrays the man behind major discoveries on connections between genes and behavior. Seymour Benzer's early work on the gene helped transform biological research, and his original, sometimes whimsical experiments at the California Institute of Technology transformed the study of genes and behavior.
	1998 Philip Gourexitch. We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families An unforgettable firsthand account of a people's response to genocide and what it tells us about humanity, this remarkable book chronicles what has happened in Rwanda and neighboring states since 1994.
	1997 Anne Fadiman. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down This brilliantly reported and beautifully crafted book explores the clash between a medical center in California and a Laotian refugee family over their care of a child--and the lack of understanding that led to tragedy.
	1996 Jonathan Raban. Bad Land: An American Romance Journeys beyond the myth of the American West to reveal the harsh and desperate realities of the homesteaders' lives, offering an incisive portrait of the American heartland that redefines the essence of the American dream.
	1995 Jonathan Harr. A Civil Action This riveting work of legal reportage is at once the story of an emotionally explosive lawsuit and a searing expose of the American legal system. When young lawyer Jan Schlichtmann initiates a civil suit against two of the nation's largest corporations who stand accused of the deaths of children in a Massachusetts suburb, he finds himself locked in an epic struggle that costs him his home, his reputation, and very nearly his sanity.
	1994 Lynn H. Nicholas. The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe's Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War Describes the systematic looting and destruction of Europe's vast art treasures, by the Nazis and the ravages of World War II, and examines the salvage and restitution efforts of curators, citizens, and ""monuments officers"" following the war.
	1993 Alan Lomax. The Land Where Blues Began Folklorist Lomax offers a rollicking memoir of his journey back into blues country.
	1992 Norman Maclean. Young Men and Fire A riveting account of the Mann Gulch fire, its aftermath, and Maclean's 14-year investigation of the fatal fire.
	1991 Susan Faludi. Backlash A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist shows how virtually every outlet of America's culture contributes to keeping women in their place as second-class citizens.
	1990 Shelby Steele. The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America In this controversial collection of essays, award-winning writer Shelby Steele tackles the tough question "Why, after 25 years of legal change and ebbing prejudice, are blacks worse off today?"
	1989 Michael Dorris. The Broken Cord The moving story of his adopted Sioux son Adam, who suffers from Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, and offers an informed general account of FAS itself.
	1988 Taylor Branch. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63 Moving from the fiery political baptism of Martin Luther King, Jr., to the corridors of Camelot where the Kennedy brothers weighed demands for justice against the deceptions of J. Edgar Hoover, here is a vivid tapestry of America, torn and finally transformed by a revolutionary struggle unequaled since the Civil War.
	1987 Richard Rhodes. The Making of the Atomic Bomb A gripping, authoritative account of the men, women, science, drama and intrigue behind the single most important event of the century: the discovery of nuclear energy and construction of the atomic bomb.
	1986 John W. Dower. War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War War Without Mercy offers a fresh and challenging insight into the Pacific phase of World War II by examining the racist stereotypes that dominated the way Americans and Japanese thought about each other.
	1985 J. Anthony Lucas. Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three Americans
	1984 Freeman Dyson. Weapons and Hope Freeman Dyson combines autobiographical material and reflecting critically on how, exactly, man may hope to survive as a species, having created nuclear weapons and having armed several nations with them.
	1983 Seymour M. Hirsh. The Price of Power: Kissinger and the Nixon White House
	1982 Robert A. Caro. The Path toPower: The Years of Lyndon Johnson The award-winning, bestselling biography that traces Lyndon Johnson's rise tonational prominence.
	1981 Stephen J. Gould. The Mismeasure of Man Exposes the fatal flaws in the ranking of people according to their supposed gifts and limits by discussing the development of the theory of limits and by reanalyzing the data on which it is based.
	1980 Ronald Steel. Walter Lippmann and the American Century
	1979 Telford Taylor. Munich: The Price of Peace A political and diplomatic history of the 1930's in Europe, culminating in the Munich conference in 1938.
	1978 Maureen Howard. Facts of Life
	1977 Walter Jackson Bate. Samuel Johnson
	1976 Maxine Hong Kingston. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts Sensitive account of growing up female and Chinese-American in a California laundry.
	1975 R.W.B. Lewis. Edith Wharton