LibGuides: National Book Critics Circle Award: 2000s

The National Book Critics Circle Awards
2000 - 2009

Fiction 2000-2009

WINNER

Being Dead by Jim Crace

FINALISTS:

A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You by Amy Bloom
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
Assorted Fire Events: stories by David Means
White Teeth by Zadie Smith

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
Call Number: FIC CHAGO MIC AM (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780679450047
Publication Date: 2000-09-19
A young escape artist and budding magician named Joe Kavalier arrives on the doorstep of his cousin, Sammy Clay. While the long shadow of Hitler falls across Europe, America is happily in thrall to the Golden Age of comic books, and in a distant corner of Brooklyn, Sammy is looking for a way to cash in on the craze. He finds the ideal partner in the aloof, artistically gifted Joe, and together they embark on an adventure that takes them deep into the heart of Manhattan, and the heart of old-fashioned American ambition. From the shared fears, dreams, and desires of two teenage boys, they spin comic book tales of the heroic, fascist-fighting Escapist and the beautiful, mysterious Luna Moth, otherworldly mistress of the night. Climbing from the streets of Brooklyn to the top of the Empire State Building, Joe and Sammy carve out lives, and careers, as vivid as cyan and magenta ink. Spanning continents and eras, this superb book by one of America’s finest writers remains one of the defining novels of our modern American age.

White Teeth [Kindle] by Zadie Smith
Call Number: FIC SMITH ZAD WH Kindle (Request at circulation desk)
ISBN: 9781400075508
Publication Date: 2000
Zadie Smith's dazzling debut caught critics grasping for comparisons and deciding on everyone from Charles Dickens to Salman Rushdie to John Irving and Martin Amis. But the truth is that Zadie Smith's voice is remarkably, fluently, and altogether wonderfully her own. At the center of this invigorating novel are two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. Hapless veterans of World War II, Archie and Samad and their families become agents of England's irrevocable transformation. A second marriage to Clara Bowden, a beautiful, albeit tooth-challenged, Jamaican half his age, quite literally gives Archie a second lease on life, and produces Irie, a knowing child whose personality doesn't quite match her name (Jamaican for "no problem). "Samad's late-in-life arranged marriage (he had to wait for his bride to be born), produces twin sons whose separate paths confound Iqbal's every effort to direct them, and a renewed, if selective, submission to his Islamic faith. Set against London's racial and cultural tapestry, venturing across the former empire and into the past as it barrels toward the future, White Teeth.
White Teeth [E-Book] : a novel by Zadie Smith
Call Number: FIC SMITH ZAD WH Ebook (OverDrive)
ISBN: 9781400075508
Publication Date: 2003

WINNER

Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald

FINALISTS:

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: stories by Alice Munro
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
John Henry Days by Colson Whitehead

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Call Number: FIC FRANZ JON CO (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780374100124
Publication Date: 2001-09-01
A bold, comic, tragic, deeply moving family drama that stretches from the Midwest at mid-century to Wall Street and Eastern Europe in the age of greed and globalism. Franzen brings an old-time America of freight trains and civic duty, of Cub Scouts and Christmas cookies and sexual inhibitions, into brilliant collision with the modern absurdities of brain science, home surveillance, hands-off parenting, do-it-yourself mental healthcare, and the anti-gravity New Economy.
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage : stories by Alice Munro
Call Number: FIC MUNRO ALI HA (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780375413001
Publication Date: 2001-11-06
A tough-minded housekeeper jettisons the habits of a lifetime because of a teenager’s practical joke. A college student visiting her brassy, unconventional aunt stumbles on an astonishing secret and its meaning in her own life. An incorrigible philanderer responds with unexpected grace to his wife’s nursing-home romance. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage is Munro at her best, tirelessly observant, serenely free of illusion, deeply and gloriously humane.
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
Call Number: FIC PATCH ANN BE (Adult fiction)
ISBN: 9780060188733
Publication Date: 2001-05-22
Somewhere in South America, at the home of the country's vice president, a lavish birthday party is being held in honor of the powerful businessman Mr. Hosokawa. Roxanne Coss, opera's most revered soprano, has mesmerized the international guests with her singing. It is a perfect evening—until a band of gun-wielding terrorists takes the entire party hostage. But what begins as a panicked, life-threatening scenario slowly evolves into something quite different, a moment of great beauty, as terrorists and hostages forge unexpected bonds and people from different continents become compatriots, intimate friends, and lovers.

WINNER

Atonement by Ian McEwan (Read by)
Call Number: FIC MEWAN IAN AT (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780385503952
Publication Date: 2002-03-12
On a hot summer day in 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses a moment’s flirtation between her older sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of a servant and Cecilia’s childhood friend. But Briony’ s incomplete grasp of adult motives–together with her precocious literary gifts–brings about a crime that will change all their lives. As it follows that crime’s repercussions through the chaos and carnage of World War II and into the close of the twentieth century, Atonement engages the reader on every conceivable level, with an ease and authority that mark it as a genuine masterpiece.
Atonement [E-Book] by Ian McEwan
Call Number: FIC MEWAN IAN AT Ebook (OverDrive)
ISBN: 9781400075553
Publication Date: 2003

FINALISTS:

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Nowhere Man by Aleksandar Hemon
Roscoe by William Kennedy
The Darts of Cupid: and other stories by Edith Templeton

WINNER

The Known World by Edward P. Jones
Call Number: FIC JONES EDWP KN (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780060557546
Publication Date: 2003-08-14
The Known World tells the story of Henry Townsend, a black farmer and former slave who falls under the tutelage of William Robbins, the most powerful man in Manchester County, Virginia. Making certain he never circumvents the law, Townsend runs his affairs with unusual discipline. But when death takes him unexpectedly, his widow, Caldonia, can't uphold the estate's order, and chaos ensues.

FINALISTS:

Brick Lane by Monica Ali
The Time of Our Singing by Richard Powers
Old School by Tobias Wolff
A Distant Shore by Caryl Phillips

Brick Lane [Kindle] by Mónica Ali
Call Number: FIC ALI MON BR Kindle (Request at circulation desk)
ISBN: 9780743243308
Publication Date: 2003-08-19
Carrying into her adult years a sense of fatalism instilled during her hardscrabble birth, Nazneen finds herself married off to a man twice her age and moved to London, where she begins to wonder if she has a say in her own destiny.
The Time of Our Singing [Kindle] by Richard Powers
Call Number: FIC POWER RIC TI Kindle (Request at circulaton desk)
ISBN: 9780374277826
Publication Date: 2003-01-22
On Easter day, 1939, at Marian Anderson’s epochal concert on the Washington Mall, David Strom, a German Jewish émigré scientist, meets Delia Daley, a young Black Philadelphian studying to be a singer. Their mutual love of music draws them together, and—against all odds and their better judgment—they marry. They vow to raise their children beyond time, beyond identity, steeped only in song. Jonah, Joseph, and Ruth grow up, however, during the civil rights era, coming of age in the violent 1960s, and living out adulthood in the racially retrenched late century. Jonah, the eldest, “whose voice could make heads of state repent,” follows a life in his parents’ beloved classical music. Ruth, the youngest, devotes herself to community activism and repudiates the white culture her brother represents. Joseph, the middle child and the narrator of this generation-bridging tale, struggles to find himself and remain connected to them both.
Old School [Kindle] : a novel by Tobias Wolff
Call Number: FIC WOLFF TOB OL Kindle (Adult fiction)
ISBN: 9781400095254
Publication Date: 2004
The protagonist of Tobias Wolff's shrewdly--and at times devastatingly--observed first novel is a boy at an elite prep school in 1960. He is an outsider who has learned to mimic the negligent manner of his more privileged classmates. Like many of them, he wants more than anything on earth to become a writer. But to do that he must first learn to tell the truth about himself.
A Distant Shore by Karen Kingsbury
Call Number: FIC KINGS KAR DS (Adult fiction)
ISBN: 9781982104351
Publication Date: 2021-04-27
She was a child caught in a riptide in the Caribbean Sea. He was a teenager from the East Coast on vacation with his family. He dove in to save her, and that single terrifying moment changed both their lives forever.Ten years later Jack Ryder is a daring secret agent with the FBI and Eliza Lawrence still lives on that pristine island. Shes an untainted princess in a kingdom of darkness and evil, on the brink of a forced marriage with a dangerous neighboring drug lord, a marriage arranged by her father.This time when Jack and Eliza meet, theres a connection neither of them can explain. Both their lives are on the line, and once again, the stakes are deadly high. Can they join forces in a complicated and dangerous mission, pretending to have a breathtaking lovewithout really falling? Sometimes miracles happen not once, but twicealong a distant shore.

WINNER

Gilead [Kindle] by Marilynne Robinson
Call Number: FIC ROBIN MAR G1 Kindle (Request at circulation desk)
Publication Date: 2005
An intimate tale of three generations, from the Civil War to the 20th century: a story about fathers and sons and the spiritual battles that still rage at America's heart.
Gilead [E-Book] by Marilynne Robinson
Call Number: FIC ROBIN MAR G1 Ebook (OverDrive)
ISBN: 9780374706098
Publication Date: 2004-11-15

FINALISTS:

The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat
The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
The Plot Against America by Philip Roth

The Line of Beauty by Hollinghurst, Alan
Call Number: FIC HOLLI ALA LI (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9781582346106
Publication Date: 2005-10-17
20-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens. An innocent in matters of politics and money, he becomes caught up in the Feddins' world: its grand parties, its surprising alliances, its parade of monsters both comic and menacing. In an era of endless possibility, he finds himself able to pursue his own private obssession with beauty--a prize as compelling to him as power and riches are to his friends.

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Call Number: FIC MITCH DAV CL (Adult fiction)
ISBN: 9780812994711
Publication Date: 2012-11-20
Recounts the connected stories of people from the past and the distant future, from a nineteenth-century notary and an investigative journalist in the 1970s to a young man who searches for meaning in a post-apocalyptic world.
Cloud Atlas [E-Book] by David Mitchell
Call Number: FIC MITCH DAV CL Ebook (OverDrive)
ISBN: 9780812994711
Publication Date: 2012-11-20

The Plot Against America [E-Book] by Philip Roth
Call Number: FIC ROTH PHI PL Ebook (OverDrive)
ISBN: 9780547345314
Publication Date: 2004-10-05
In an extraordinary feat of narrative invention, Philip Roth imagines an alternate history where Franklin D. Roosevelt loses the 1940 presidential election to heroic aviator and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh. Shortly thereafter, Lindbergh negotiates a cordial “understanding” with Adolf Hitler, while the new government embarks on a program of folksy anti-Semitism. For one boy growing up in Newark, Lindbergh’s election is the first in a series of ruptures that threaten to destroy his small, safe corner of America–and with it, his mother, his father, and his older brother.

WINNER

The March by E. L. Doctorow
Call Number: FIC DOCTOR EL MA (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780375506710
Publication Date: 2005-09-20
In 1864, Union general William Tecumseh Sherman marched his sixty thousand troops through Georgia to the sea, and then up into the Carolinas. The army fought off Confederate forces, demolished cities, and accumulated a borne-along population of freed blacks and white refugees until all that remained was the dangerous transient life of the dispossessed and the triumphant.
The March [E-Book] by E. L. Doctorow
Call Number: FIC DOCTO EL MA Ebook (OverDrive)
ISBN: 9781588365095
Publication Date: 2005-09-20

FINALISTS:

Veronica by Mary Gaitskill
Small Island by Andrea Levy
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiiguro
Europe Central by William T. Vollmann

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Call Number: FIC ISHIG KAZ NE (Adult fiction)
ISBN: 9781400043392
Publication Date: 2005-04-05
From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans, comes an unforgettable edge-of-your-seat mystery that is at once heartbreakingly tender and morally courageous about what it means to be human. Hailsham seems like a pleasant English boarding school, far from the influences of the city. Its students are well tended and supported, trained in art and literature, and become just the sort of people the world wants them to be. But, curiously, they are taught nothing of the outside world and are allowed little contact with it. Within the grounds of Hailsham, Kathy grows from schoolgirl to young woman, but it's only when she and her friends Ruth and Tommy leave the safe grounds of the school (as they always knew they would) that they realize the full truth of what Hailsham is.
Never Let Me Go [E-Book] by Kazuo Ishiguro
Call Number: FIC ISHIG KAZ NE Ebook (OverDrive)
ISBN: 9781400044832
Publication Date: 2005

Europe Central [Kindle] by William T. Vollmann; Ralph Cosham (Narrated by)
Call Number: FIC VOLLM WILT EU Kindle (Request at circulation desk)
ISBN: 9781433243073
Publication Date: 2012-01-20
Vollmann presents a mesmerizing series of intertwined paired stories that compare and contrast the moral decisions made by various figures (some famous, some infamous, some unknown) associated with the warring authoritarian cultures of Germany and the USSR from 1900-1968.

WINNER

The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
Call Number: FIC DESAI KIR IN (Adult fiction)
ISBN: 9780871139290
Publication Date: 2005-11-28
Kiran Desai's tragicomic novel The Inheritance of Loss spans two continents and three generations. The story cuts between New York and India, contrasting the menial jobs and meager conditions of immigrant life in the city with the political unrest engulfing an isolated Himalayan hill town.

FINALISTS:

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
What is the What by Dave Eggers
The Lay of the Land by Richard Ford
The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Call Number: FIC MCART CO RO (Adult fiction)
ISBN: 9780307265432
Publication Date: 2006-09-26
America is a barren landscape of smoldering ashes, devoid of life except for those people still struggling to scratch out some type of existence. Amidst the destruction, a father and his young son walk, always toward the coast, but with no real understanding that circumstances will improve once they arrive. Still they persevere, and their relationship comes to represent goodness in a world that is utterly devastated.
The Road [CD] by Cormac McCarthy; Tom Stechschulte (Narrated by)
Call Number: CD Fiction MC (Adult Audiobook CD)
ISBN: 9781428112780
Publication Date: 2006-08-28
The Road [E-Book] by Cormac McCarthy
Call Number: FIC MCART CO RO Ebook (OverDrive)
ISBN: 9780307267450
Publication Date: 2007

WINNER

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao [E-Book] by Junot Diaz
Call Number: FIC DIAZ JUN BR Ebook (OverDrive)
ISBN: 9781101147306
Publication Date: 2007
Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd who—from the New Jersey home he shares with his old world mother and rebellious sister—dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, finding love. But Oscar may never get what he wants. Blame the fukú—a curse that has haunted Oscar’s family for generations, following them on their epic journey from Santo Domingo to the USA. Encapsulating Dominican-American history, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao opens our eyes to an astonishing vision of the contemporary American experience and explores the endless human capacity to persevere—and risk it all—in the name of love.

FINALISTS:

Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra
In the Country of Men by Hisam Matar
The Gravedigger's Daughter by Joyce Carol Oates
The Shadow Catcher by Marianne Wiggins

In the Country of Men [Kindle] by Hisham Matar
Call Number: FIC MATAR HIS IN Kindle (Request at Circulation Desk)
ISBN: 9780440336648
Publication Date: 2007
Libya, 1979. Nine-year-old Suleiman’s days are circumscribed by the narrow rituals of childhood: outings to the ruins surrounding Tripoli, games with friends played under the burning sun, exotic gifts from his father’s constant business trips abroad. But his nights have come to revolve around his mother’s increasingly disturbing bedside stories full of old family bitterness. And then one day Suleiman sees his father across the square of a busy marketplace, his face wrapped in a pair of dark sunglasses. Wasn’t he supposed to be away on business yet again? Why is he going into that strange building with the green shutters? Why did he lie? Suleiman is soon caught up in a world he cannot hope to understand—where the sound of the telephone ringing becomes a portent of grave danger; where his mother frantically burns his father’s cherished books; where a stranger full of sinister questions sits outside in a parked car all day; where his best friend’s father can disappear overnight, next to be seen publicly interrogated on state television.

The Gravedigger's Daughter by Joyce Carol Oates
Call Number: FIC OATES JOYC GR (Adult fiction)
ISBN: 9780061236822
Publication Date: 2007-05-29
Fleeing Nazi Germany in 1936, the Schwarts immigrate to a small town in upstate New York. Here the father—a former high school teacher—is demeaned by the only job he can get: gravedigger and cemetery caretaker. When local prejudice and the family's own emotional frailty give rise to an unthinkable tragedy, the gravedigger's daughter, Rebecca heads out into America. Embarking upon an extraordinary odyssey of erotic risk and ingenious self-invention, she seeks renewal, redemption, and peace—on the road to a bittersweet and distinctly “American” triumph.

WINNER

2666 by Roberto Bolaño

FINALISTS:

Home by Marilynne Robinson
The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon
The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart by M. Glenn Taylor
Olive Kittredge by Elizabeth Strout

Home [E-Book] by Marilynne Robinson
Call Number: FIC ROBIN MAR G2 Ebook (OverDrive)
ISBN: 9781429929042
Publication Date: 2008-09-02
Glory Boughton, aged 38, has returned to Gilead to care for her dying father. Soon her brother, Jack - the prodigal son of the family, gone for 20 years - comes home too, looking for refuge and trying to make peace with a past littered with tormenting trouble and pain. Jack is one of the great characters in recent literature. A bad boy from childhood, an alcoholic who cannot hold a job, he is perpetually at odds with his surroundings and with his traditionalist father, though he remains Boughton's most beloved child. Brilliant, lovable, and wayward, Jack forges an intense bond with Glory and engages painfully with Ames, his godfather and namesake.

WINNER

Wolf Hall (Wolf Hall #1) by Hilary Mantel
Call Number: FIC MANTE HIL W1 (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780805080681
Publication Date: 2009-10-13
England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes him. Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell: a wholly original man, a charmer and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people, and implacable in his ambition. But Henry is volatile: one day tender, one day murderous. Cromwell helps him break the opposition, but what will be the price of his triumph?
Wolf Hall [CD] (Wolf Hall #1) by Hilary Mantel; Simon Slater (Read by)
Call Number: CD Fiction MA (Adult CD Audiobooks)
ISBN: 9781427210166
Publication Date: 2009-11-24
Wolf Hall [E-Book] (Wolf Hall #1) by Hilary Mantel
Call Number: FIC MANTE HIL W1 Ebook (OverDrive)
ISBN: 9781429943284
Publication Date: 2009-10-13
Wolf Hall [Streaming audiobook] (Wolf Hall #1) by Hilary Mantel
Call Number: FIC MANTE HIL W1 Audiobk
ISBN: 9781427220370
Publication Date: 2010
Unabridged. Narrator: Simon Slater.

FINALISTS:

American Salvage by Bonnie Jo Campbell
The Book of Night Women by Marlon James
Blame by Michelle Huneven
Lark and Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips

The Book of Night Women by Marlon James
Call Number: FIC JAMES MAR BO (Adult fiction)
ISBN: 9781594488573
Publication Date: 2009-02-19
It is the story of Lilith, born into slavery on a Jamaican sugar plantation at the end of the eighteenth century. Even at her birth, the slave women around her recognize a dark power that they- and she-will come to both revere and fear. The Night Women, as they call themselves, have long been plotting a slave revolt, and as Lilith comes of age they see her as the key to their plans. But when she begins to understand her own feelings, desires, and identity, Lilith starts to push at the edges of what is imaginable for the life of a slave woman, and risks becoming the conspiracy's weak link.
Lark and Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips
Call Number: Fiction P560L (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780375401954
Publication Date: 2009-01-06
At its center: Lark and her brother, Termite, a child unable to walk and talk but full of radiance; their mother, Lola; their aunt, Nonie, who raises them; and Termite’s father, Corporal Robert Leavitt, who finds himself caught up in the chaotic early months of the Korean War. Told with enormous imagination and deep feeling, the novel invites us into the hearts and thoughts of each of the leading characters; even into Termite’s intricate, shuttered consciousness. We are with Leavitt, trapped by friendly fire. We see Lark’s hopes for herself and Termite, and how she makes them happen. We learn of Lola’s love for her soldier husband and children, and unravel the mystery of her relationship with Nonie. We discover the lasting connections between past and future on the night the town experiences an overwhelming flood, and we follow Lark and Termite as their lives are changed forever.

General Nonfiction 2000-2009

WINNER

Newjack: guarding Sing Sing by Ted Conover

FINALISTS:

Crucible of War by Fred Anderson
Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the end of the Cold War by Frances Fitzgerald
Betrayal of Trust: the collapse of global public health by Laurie Garrett
The Collaborator: the trial and execution of Robert Brasillach by Alice Kaplan

Betrayal of Trust : the collapse of global public health by Laurie Garrett
Call Number: 362.1 G239b (Adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 9780786865222
Publication Date: 2000-08-16
Laurie Garrett takes on perhaps the most crucial global issue of our time in this eye-opening book. She asks: is our collective health in a state of decline? If so, how dire is this crisis and has the public health system itself contributed to it? Using riveting detail and finely-honed storytelling, exploring outbreaks around the world, Garrett exposes the underbelly of the world's globalization to find out if it can still be assumed that government can and will protect the people's health, or if that trust has been irrevocably broken.

WINNER

Double Fold : libraries and the assault on paper by Nicholson Baker
Call Number: 025.2 B168d (Adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 9780375504440
Publication Date: 2001-04-10
Since the 1950s, our country’s greatest libraries have, as a matter of common practice, dismantled their collections of original bound newspapers and so-called brittle books, replacing them with microfilmed copies. The marketing of the brittle-paper crisis and the real motives behind it are the subject of this passionately argued book, in which Nicholson Barker pleads the case for saving our recorded heritage in its original form while telling the story of how and why our greatest research libraries betrayed the public trust by auctioning off or pulping irreplaceable collections. The players include the Library of Congress, the CIA, NASA, microfilm lobbyists, newspaper dealers, and a colorful array of librarians and digital futurists, as well as Baker himself — who eventually discovers that the only way to save one important newspaper is to buy it. Double Fold is an intense, brilliantly worded narrative that is sure to provoke discussion and controversy.

FINALISTS:

The Lost Children of Wilder: the epic struggle to change foster care by Nina Bernstein
Neighbors: the destruction of the Jewish community in Jedwabne, Poland by Jan T. Gross
Seabiscuit: an American legend by Laura Hillenbrand
The Brother: the untold story of atomic spy David Greenglass and how he sent his sister, Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair by Sam Roberts

Seabiscuit : an American legend by Laura Hillenbrand
Call Number: 798.4 H651s (Adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 0375502912
Publication Date: 2001-03-06
Seabiscuit [E-Book] : an American legend by Laura Hillenbrand
Call Number: 798.4 H651s Ebook (OverDrive)
ISBN: 9780345467393
Publication Date: 2003

WINNER

A Problem from Hell: America and the age of genocide by Samantha Power

FINALISTS:

War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges
American Ground: unbuilding the World Trade Center by William Langewiesche
Brown: the last discovery of America by Richard Rodriguez
Edison's Eve: a magical history of the quest for mechanical life by Gaby Wood

WINNER

Sons of Mississippi : a story of race and its legacy by Paul Hendrickson
Call Number: 305.8 H498s (Adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 9780375404610
Publication Date: 2003-03-18
They stand as unselfconscious as if the photograph were being taken at a church picnic and not during one of the pitched battles of the civil rights struggle. None of them knows that the image will appear in Life magazine or that it will become an icon of its era. The year is 1962, and these seven white Mississippi lawmen have gathered to stop James Meredith from integrating the University of Mississippi. One of them is swinging a billy club. More than thirty years later, award-winning journalist and author Paul Hendrickson sets out to discover who these men were, what happened to them after the photograph was taken, and how racist attitudes shaped the way they lived their lives. But his ultimate focus is on their children and grandchildren, and how the prejudice bequeathed by the fathers was transformed, or remained untouched, in the sons. Sons of Mississippi is a scalding yet redemptive work of social history, a book of eloquence and subtlely that tracks the movement of racism across three generations and bears witness to its ravages among both black and white Americans.

FINALISTS:

The Bounty: the true story of the Mutiny on the Bounty by Caroline Alexander
Gulag by Anne Applebaum
Random Family: love, drugs, trouble, and coming of age in the Bronx by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
Rising Up and Rising Down by William T. Vollman

The Bounty : the true story of the mutiny on the Bounty by Caroline Alexander
Call Number: 996.1 A375b (Adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 9780670031337
Publication Date: 2003-09-15
More than two centuries after Master’s Mate Fletcher Christian led a mutiny against Lieutenant William Bligh on a small, armed transport vessel called Bounty, the true story of this enthralling adventure has become obscured by the legend. Combining vivid characterization and deft storytelling, Caroline Alexander shatters the centuries-old myths surrounding this story. She brilliantly shows how, in a desperate attempt to save one man from the gallows and another from ignominy, two powerful families came together and began to create the version of history we know today. The true story of the mutiny on the Bounty is an epic of duty and heroism, pride and power, and the assassination of a brave man’s honor at the dawn of the Romantic age.

WINNER

The Reformation: a history by Diarmaid MacCulloch

FINALISTS:

Arc of Justice: a saga of race, civil rights and murder in the Jazz Age by Kevin Boyle
Blue Blood by Edward Conlon
The Working Poor: invisible in America by David Shipler
Blood Done Sign My Name: a true story by Timothy Tyson

Blue Blood by Edward Conlon
Call Number: BIO CONLO EDW B (Adult biography)
ISBN: 1573222666
Publication Date: 2004-04-12
A richly textured, anecdotal portrait of life as a police officer in the NYPD chronicles one man's life as a cop, from growing up with a police officer father and his education at Harvard, to his first day on the beat in the South Bronx and to his rise to detective, capturing the complex life on the street of the city, his law enforcement legacy, and the camraderie of the force.

WINNER

Voices from Chernobyl: the oral history of nuclear disaster by Svetlana Alexievich

FINALISTS:

The Great War for Civilisation: the conquest of the Middle East by Robert Fisk
Eating Stone: imagination and the loss of the wild by Ellen Meloy
Human Cargo: a journey among refugees by Caroline Moorehead
Night Draws Near: Iraq's people in the shadow of America's war by Anthony Shadid

WINNER

Rough Crossings : Britain, the slaves, and the American Revolution by Simon Schama
Call Number: 326 S299r (Adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 9780060539160
Publication Date: 2006-04-25
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 emancpated, tens of thousands of blacks voted with feet, escaping to fight beside the British. Originally designed to break the plantations of the American South, this military strategy instead unleashed one of the great exoduses in American history. Told in the voices of the slaves and the white abolitionists who aided them, Simon Schama vividly details the odyssey of these escaped blacks, shedding light on an extraordinary chapter in America’s birth.

FINALISTS:

The Occupation: war and resistance in Iraq by Patrick Cockburn
The Girls Who Went Away: the hidden history of women who surrendered children for adoption in the decades before Roe v. Wade by Anne Fessler
The Omnivore's Dilemma: a natural history of four meals by Michael Pollan
The Lemon Tree: an Arab, a Jew and the heart of the Middle East by Sandy Tolan

The Girls Who Went Away : the hidden history of women who surrendered children for adoption in the decades before Roe v. Wade by Ann Fessler
Call Number: 362.82 F417g (Adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 9781594200946
Publication Date: 2006-05-04
This book brings to light the lives of 1.5 million single American women in the years following World War II who, under enormous social and family pressure, were coerced to give up their newborn children. It tells not of wild and carefree sexual liberation, but rather of a devastating double standard that has had punishing long-term effects on these women and on the children they gave up. Single pregnant women were shunned by family and friends, evicted from schools, sent away to maternity homes to have their children alone, and often treated with cold contempt by doctors, nurses, and clergy. The majority of the women interviewed by Fessler, herself an adoptee, have never spoken of their experiences, and most have been haunted by grief and shame their entire adult lives.

The Omnivore's Dilemma : a natural history of four meals by Michael Pollan
Call Number: 394.1 P771o (Adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 9781594200823
Publication Date: 2006-04-11
What should we have for dinner? When you can eat just about anything nature (or the supermarket) has to offer, deciding what you should eat will inevitably stir anxiety, especially when some of the foods might shorten your life. Today, buffeted by one food fad after another, America is suffering from a national eating disorder. As the cornucopia of the modern American supermarket and fast food outlet confronts us with a bewildering and treacherous landscape, what's at stake becomes not only our own and our children's health, but the health of the environment that sustains life on earth. Pollan follows each of the food chains--industrial food, organic or alternative food, and food we forage ourselves--from the source to the final meal, always emphasizing our coevolutionary relationship with the handful of plant and animal species we depend on. The surprising answers Pollan offers have profound political, economic, psychological, and even moral implications for all of us.
The Omnivore's Dilemma [E-Book] : the secrets behind what you eat by Michael Pollan
Call Number: 394.1 P771o Ebook (OverDrive)
ISBN: 9781101148761
Publication Date: 2009

WINNER

Medical Apartheid: the dark history of medical experimentation on Black Americans from colonial times to the present by Harriet Washington

FINALISTS:

American Transcendentalism by Philip Gura
What Hath God Wrought: the transformation of America 1815-1848 by Daniel Walker Howe
Legacy of Ashes: a history of the CIA by Time Weiner
The World Without Us, Thomas Dunne by Alan Weisman

Legacy of Ashes : the history of the CIA by Tim Weiner
Call Number: 327.1273 W428L (Adult Nonfiction)
ISBN: 9780385514453
Publication Date: 2007-06-28
Here is the hidden history of the CIA: why eleven presidents and three generations of CIA officers have been unable to understand the world; why nearly every CIA director has left the agency in worse shape than he found it; and how these failures have profoundly jeopardized our national security. For sixty years, the CIA has managed to maintain a formidable reputation in spite of its terrible record, burying its blunders in top-secret archives. Its mission was to know the world--when it did not succeed, it set out to change the world instead. Now Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Weiner offers the first definitive history of the CIA, based on more than 50,000 documents, primarily from the archives of the CIA itself, and hundreds of interviews with CIA veterans, including ten Directors of Central Intelligence.
Legacy of Ashes [CD] : the history of the CIA by Tim Weiner; Stefan Rudnicki (Read by)
Call Number: CD Nonfiction WE (Adult CD audiobooks)
ISBN: 9781433201998
Publication Date: 2007-08-07

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman
Call Number: 304.2 W428w (Adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 9780312347291
Publication Date: 2007-07-10
Journalist Weisman offers an original approach to questions of humanity's impact on the planet. Drawing on the expertise of engineers, atmospheric scientists, art conservators, zoologists, oil refiners, marine biologists, astrophysicists, religious leaders, and paleontologists, he illustrates what the planet might be like today if humans disappeared. He explains how our massive infrastructure would collapse and finally vanish without human presence; which everyday items may become immortalized as fossils; how copper pipes and wiring would be crushed into mere seams of reddish rock; why some of our earliest buildings might be the last architecture left; and how plastic, bronze sculpture, radio waves, and some man-made molecules may be our most lasting gifts to the universe. As he shows which human devastations are indelible, and which examples of our highest art and culture would endure longest, Weisman's narrative ultimately drives toward a radical but persuasive solution that needn't depend on our demise.

WINNER

The Forever War by Dexter Filkins
Call Number: 956.7044 F483f (Adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 9780307266392
Publication Date: 2008-09-16
Through the eyes of Dexter Filkins, a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, we witness the rise of the Taliban in the 1990s, the aftermath of the attack on New York on September 11th, and the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Filkins is the only American journalist to have reported on all these events, and his experiences are conveyed in a riveting narrative filled with unforgettable characters and astonishing scenes. Brilliant and fearless, The Forever War is not just about America's wars after 9/11, but about the nature of war itself.

FINALISTS:

This Republic of Suffering: death and the Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust
The Dark Side by Jane Mayer
White Protestant Nation by Allan Lichtman
From Colony to Superpower: US foreign relations since 1776 by George C. Herring

This Republic of Suffering : death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust
Call Number: 973.7 F267t (Adult Nonfiction)
ISBN: 9780375404047
Publication Date: 2008-01-08
More than 600,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be six million. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust describes how the survivors managed on a practical level and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the unprecedented carnage with its belief in a benevolent God. Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, nurses, northerners and southerners come together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War's most fundamental and widely shared reality.
The Dark Side : the inside story of how the war on terror turned into a war on American ideals by Jane Mayer
Call Number: 973.931 M464d (Adult Nonfiction)
ISBN: 9780385526395
Publication Date: 2008-07-15
In the days immediately following September 11th, the most powerful people in the country were panic-stricken. Radical decisions about how to combat terrorists and strengthen national security were made in a state of chaos and fear, but the key players, Vice President Cheney and his powerful, secretive adviser David Addington, used the crisis to further a long-held agenda to enhance presidential powers to a degree never known in U.S. history, and obliterate Constitutional protections that define the very essence of the American experiment. This is a dramatic account of how the United States made terrible decisions in the pursuit of terrorists around the world--decisions that not only violated the Constitution, but also hampered the pursuit of Al Qaeda. Whatever the short-term gains, there were incalculable losses in terms of moral standing, our country's place in the world, and its sense of itself.

WINNER

The Age of Wonder : how the romantic generation discovered the beauty and terror of science by Richard Holmes
Call Number: 509.41 H752a (Adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 9780375422225
Publication Date: 2009-07-14
When young Joseph Banks stepped onto a Tahitian beach in 1769, he hoped to discover Paradise. Inspired by the scientific ferment sweeping through Britain, the botanist had sailed with Captain Cook in search of new worlds. Other voyages of discovery—astronomical, chemical, poetical, philosophical—swiftly follow in Richard Holmes's thrilling evocation of the second scientific revolution. Through the lives of William Herschel and his sister Caroline, who forever changed the public conception of the solar system; of Humphry Davy, whose near-suicidal gas experiments revolutionized chemistry; and of the great Romantic writers, from Mary Shelley to Coleridge and Keats, who were inspired by the scientific breakthroughs of their day, Holmes brings to life the era in which we first realized both the awe-inspiring and the frightening possibilities of science—an era whose consequences are with us still.

FINALISTS:

The Hindus: an alternative history by Wendy Doniger
Fordlandia: the rise and fall of Henry Ford's forgotten jungle city by Greg Grandin
Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder
Imperial by William T. Vollmann

Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder
Call Number: BIO DEOGR DEO K (Adult biography)
ISBN: 9781400066216
Publication Date: 2009-08-25
In Strength in What Remains, Tracy Kidder gives us the story of one man’s inspiring American journey and of the ordinary people who helped him, providing brilliant testament to the power of second chances. Deo arrives in the United States from Burundi in search of a new life. Having survived a civil war and genocide, he lands at JFK airport with two hundred dollars, no English, and no contacts. He ekes out a precarious existence delivering groceries, living in Central Park, and learning English by reading dictionaries in bookstores. Then Deo begins to meet the strangers who will change his life, pointing him eventually in the direction of Columbia University, medical school, and a life devoted to healing. Kidder breaks new ground in telling this unforgettable story as he travels with Deo back over a turbulent life and shows us what it means to be fully human.

Biography/Autobiography 2000-2009

WINNER

Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan by Herbert P. Bix
Call Number: 952.03 B624h (Adult Nonfiction)
ISBN: 9780060193140
Publication Date: 2000-08-22
In this groundbreaking 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. Never before has the full life of this controversial figure been revealed with such clarity and vividness. Bix shows what it was like to be trained from birth for a lone position at the apex of the nation's political hierarchy and as a revered symbol of divine status. Influenced by an unusual combination of the Japanese imperial tradition and a modern scientific worldview, the young emperor gradually evolves into his preeminent role, aligning himself with the growing ultranationalist movement, perpetuating a cult of religious emperor worship, resisting attempts to curb his power, and all the while burnishing his image as a reluctant, passive monarch. Here we see Hirohito as he truly was: a man of strong will and real authority.

FINALISTS:

The Monk in the Garden: the lost and found genius of Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics by Robin Marantz Henig
I Will Bear Witness: a diary of the Nazi years, 1942-1945 by Victor Kemplerer
The Chief: the life of William Randolph Hearst by David Nasaw
Marcel Proust: a life by Jean-Yves Tadie

WINNER

Boswell's Presumptuous Task: the making of the life of Dr. Johnson by Adam Sisman

FINALISTS:

Borrowed Finery: a memoir by Paula Fox
Positively 4th Street: the lives and times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina by David Hajdu
Milking the Moon: a southerner's story of life on this planet by Katherine Clark
The Scarlet Professor: Newton Arvin: a literary life shattered by scandal by Berry Werth

WINNER

Charles Darwin: the power of place by Janet Browne

FINALISTS:

Master of the Senate: the Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert A. Caro
The Last American War by Elizabeth Gilbert
Benjamin Franklin by Edmund S. Morgan
Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone: the Carter Family and their legacy in American Music by Mark Zwonitzer with Charles Hirshberg

WINNER

Khrushchev: the man and his era by WIlliam Taubman

FINALISTS:

The Life You Save May Be Your Own: an American pilgrimage by Paul Elie
A Tragic Honesty: the life and work of Richard Yates by Blake Bailey
Jonathan Edwards: a life by George Marsden
Lucia Joyce: to dance in the wake by Carol Loeb Shloss

WINNER

De Kooning: an American master by Mark Stevens & Annalyn Swan

FINALISTS:

Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow
Chronicles: Vol. 1 by Bob Dylan
Will in the World: how Shakespeare became Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt
Queen of Scots: the true life of Mary Stuart by John Guy

Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow
Call Number: BIO HAMIL ALE C (Adult biography)
ISBN: 9781594200090
Publication Date: 2004-04-26
Few figures in American history have been more hotly debated or more grossly misunderstood than Alexander Hamilton. Chernow’s biography gives Hamilton his due and sets the record straight, deftly illustrating that the political and economic greatness of today’s America is the result of Hamilton’s countless sacrifices to champion ideas that were often wildly disputed during his time. “To repudiate his legacy,” Chernow writes, “is, in many ways, to repudiate the modern world.” Chernow here recounts Hamilton’s turbulent life: an illegitimate, largely self-taught orphan from the Caribbean, he came out of nowhere to take America by storm, rising to become George Washington’s aide-de-camp in the Continental Army, coauthoring The Federalist Papers, founding the Bank of New York, leading the Federalist Party, and becoming the first Treasury Secretary of the United States.Historians have long told the story of America’s birth as the triumph of Jefferson’s democratic ideals over the aristocratic intentions of Hamilton. Chernow presents an entirely different man, whose legendary ambitions were motivated not merely by self-interest but by passionate patriotism and a stubborn will to build the foundations of American prosperity and power. His is a Hamilton far more human than we’ve encountered before—from his shame about his birth to his fiery aspirations, from his intimate relationships with childhood friends to his titanic feuds with Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Monroe, and Burr, and from his highly public affair with Maria Reynolds to his loving marriage to his loyal wife Eliza. And never before has there been a more vivid account of Hamilton’s famous and mysterious death in a duel with Aaron Burr in July of 1804. Chernow’s biography is not just a portrait of Hamilton, but the story of America’s birth seen through its most central figure. At a critical time to look back to our roots, Alexander Hamilton will remind readers of the purpose of our institutions and our heritage as Americans.
Alexander Hamilton [E-Book] by Ron Chernow
Call Number: BIO HAMIL ALE C Ebook (OverDrive)
ISBN: 9781101200858
Publication Date: 2005
Alexander Hamilton [streaming audiobook] by Ron Chernow
Call Number: BIO HAMIL ALE C Audiobk (Adult biography)
ISBN: 9781524708665
Publication Date: 2004

Chronicles. Volume 1 by Bob Dylan
Call Number: BIO DYLAN BOB C1 (Adult biography)
ISBN: 9780743228152
Publication Date: 2004-10-05
“I’d come from a long ways off and had started a long ways down. But now destiny was about to manifest itself. I felt like it was looking right at me and nobody else.” So writes Bob Dylan in Chronicles: Volume One, his remarkable book exploring critical junctures in his life and career. Through Dylan’s eyes and open mind, we see Greenwich Village, circa 1961, when he first arrives in Manhattan. Dylan’s New York is a magical city of possibilities—smoky, nightlong parties; literary awakenings; transient loves and unbreakable friendships. Elegiac observations are punctuated by jabs of memories, penetrating and tough. With the book’s side trips to New Orleans, Woodstock, Minnesota, and points west, Chronicles: Volume One is an intimate and intensely personal recollection of extraordinary times. By turns revealing, poetical, passionate, and witty, Chronicles: Volume One is a mesmerizing window on Bob Dylan’s thoughts and influences. Dylan’s voice is distinctively American: generous of spirit, engaged, fanciful, and rhythmic. Utilizing his unparalleled gifts of storytelling and the exquisite expressiveness that are the hallmarks of his music, Bob Dylan turns Chronicles: Volume One into a poignant reflection on life, and the people and places that helped shape the man and the art.

Will in the World : how Shakespeare became Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt
Call Number: BIO SHAKE WIL G (Adult biography)
ISBN: 9780393050578
Publication Date: 2004-09-17
A young man from a small provincial town moves to London in the late 1580s and, in a remarkably short time, becomes the greatest playwright not of his age alone but of all time. How is an achievement of this magnitude to be explained? Stephen Greenblatt brings us down to earth to see, hear, and feel how an acutely sensitive and talented boy, surrounded by the rich tapestry of Elizabethan life, could have become the world’s greatest playwright.

Biography 2000-2009

WINNER

American Prometheus: the triumph and tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin

FINALISTS:

Lee Miller: a life by Carolyn Burke
Like a Fiery Elephant: the story of B. S. Johnson by Jonathan Coe
Team of Rivals: the political genius of Abraham LIncoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Mark Twain: a life by Ron Powers

Team of Rivals : the political genius of Abraham LIncoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Call Number: BIO LINCO ABR G (Adult biography)
ISBN: 9780684824901
Publication Date: 2005-10-25
This multiple biography is centered on Lincoln's mastery of men and how it shaped the most significant presidency in the nation's history. Historian Goodwin illuminates Lincoln's political genius, as the one-term congressman rises from obscurity to prevail over three gifted rivals to become president. When Lincoln emerged as the victor at the Republican National Convention, his rivals were dismayed. Throughout the turbulent 1850s, each had energetically sought the presidency as the conflict over slavery led inexorably to civil war. That Lincoln succeeded, Goodwin demonstrates, was because of his extraordinary ability to put himself in the place of other men, to experience what they were feeling, to understand their motives and desires. It was this that enabled Lincoln to bring his disgruntled opponents together, create the most unusual cabinet in history, and marshal their talents to the task of preserving the Union.
Team of Rivals [CD] : the political genius of Abraham LIncoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin; Richard Thomas (Read by)
Call Number: CD Nonfiction LI (Adult CD audiobooks)
ISBN: 9780743539135
Publication Date: 2005-10-25

Mark Twain : a life by Ron Powers
Call Number: BIO TWAIN MAR P (Adult biography)
ISBN: 9780743248990
Publication Date: 2005-09-13
Samuel Clemens, the man known as Mark Twain, invented the American voice and became one of our greatest celebrities. His life mirrored his country's, as he grew from a Mississippi River boyhood in the days of the frontier, to a Wild-West journalist during the Gold Rush, to become the king of the eastern establishment and a global celebrity as America became an international power. Along the way, Mark Twain keenly observed the characters and voices that filled the growing country, and left us our first authentically American literature. Ron Powers's magnificent biography offers the definitive life of the founding father of our culture.

WINNER

James Tiptree, Jr.: the double life of Alice B. Sheldon by Julie Phillips

FINALISTS:

The Most Famous Man in America: the biography of Henry War Beecher by Debby Applegate
At Canaan's Edge: America in the King years, 1965-1968 by Taylor Branch
Flaubert: a biography by Frederick Brown
A Sense of the World: how a blind man became history's greatest traveler by Jason Roberts

At Canaan's Edge : America in the King years, 1965-68 by Taylor Branch
Call Number: BIO KING MARL B3 (Adult biography)
ISBN: 9780684857121
Publication Date: 2006-01-10
The final volume of Taylor Branch's monumental, much honored, and definitive history of the Civil Rights Movement (America in the King Years), At Canaan's Edge covers the final years of King's struggle to hold his non-violent movement together in the face of factionalism within the Movement, hostility and harassment of the Johnson Administration, the country torn apart by Vietnam, and his own attempt (and failure) to take the Freedom Movement north. At Canaan's Edge traces a seminal era in our defining national story, freedom. The narrative resumes in Selma, crucible of the voting rights struggle for black people across the South. The time is early 1965, when the modern Civil Rights Movement enters its second decade since the Supreme Court's Brown decision declared segregation by race a violation of the Constitution. From Selma, King's non-violent Movement is under threat from competing forces inside and outside. Branch chronicles the dramatic voting rights drives in Mississippi and Alabama, Meredith's murder, the challenge to King from the Johnson Administration and the FBI and other enemies. When King tries to bring his Movement north (to Chicago), he falters. Finally we reach Memphis, the garbage strike, King's assassination.

Flaubert : a biography by Frederick Brown
Call Number: BIO FLAUB GUS B (Adult biography)
ISBN: 9780316118781
Publication Date: 2006-04-06
As Frederick Brown reveals, Flaubert was fraught with contradiction -- a sedentary man who took epic voyages through Egypt and the Middle East; a man of genius who could be flamboyantly uncouth, but was fanatically devoted to beautifully cadenced prose. While making much of his camaraderie with male friends, Flaubert depended upon the emotional nurture of maternal women, notably George Sand, with whom he engaged in a justly celebrated correspondence. His assorted mistresses -- French, Egyptian, and English -- fed both his richly erotic imagination and his fictional characters, and his letters provide a record of them. Flaubert's time and place literally put him on trial for portraying lewd behavior in Madame Bovary. His milieu also made him a celebrity and, indirectly, brought about his financial ruin. Flaubert died suddenly at the age of fifty-nine, and soon afterward, his beloved retreat near Rouen was torn down and converted into a distillery to cover his niece's debts. He privately dreamed of popular success, which he in fact achieved with Madame Bovary, but never sacrificed to it his ideal of artistic integrity. Frederick Brown's magisterial biography honors his subject's life, times, and legacy.

WINNER

Stanley: the impossible life of Africa's greatest explorer by Tim Jeal

FINALISTS:

Edith Wharton by Hermione Lee
Ralph Ellison by Arnold Rampersad
The Life of Picasso: the triumphant years, 1917-1933 by John Richardson
Thomas Hardy by Claire Tomalin

Edith Wharton by Hermione Lee
Call Number: BIO WHART EDI L (Adult biography)
ISBN: 9780375400049
Publication Date: 2007-04-10
From Hermione Lee, the internationally acclaimed, award-winning biographer of Virginia Woolf and Willa Cather, comes a superb reexamination of one of the most famous American women of letters.Delving into heretofore untapped sources, Lee does away with the image of the snobbish bluestocking and gives us a new Edith Wharton-tough, startlingly modern, as brilliant and complex as her fiction. Born into a wealthy family, Wharton left America as an adult and eventually chose to create a life in France. Her renowned novels and stories have become classics of American literature, but as Lee shows, Wharton's own life, filled with success and scandal, was as intriguing as those of her heroines. Bridging two centuries and two very different sensibilities, Wharton here comes to life in the skillful hands of one of the great literary biographers of our time.
Thomas Hardy by Claire Tomalin
Call Number: BIO HARDY THO T (Adult biography)
ISBN: 9781594201189
Publication Date: 2007-01-18
The novels of Thomas Hardy have a permanent place on every booklover's shelf, yet little is known about the interior life of the man who wrote them. A believer and an unbeliever, a socialist and a snob, an unhappy husband and a desolate widower, Hardy challenged the sexual and religious conventions of his time in his novels and then abandoned fiction to reestablish himself as a great twentieth-century lyric poet. In this acclaimed new biography, Claire Tomalin, one of today's preeminent literary biographers, investigates this beloved writer and reveals a figure as rich and complex as his tremendous legacy.

WINNER

The World Is What It Is: the authorized biography of V. S. Naipaul by Patrick French

FINALISTS:

Ida, A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the campaign against lynching by Paula J. Giddings
The Bin Ladens: an Arabian family in an American century by Steve Coll
The Hemingses of Monticello: an American family by Annette Gordon-Reed
White Heat: the friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson by Brenda Wineapple

The Bin Ladens : an Arabian family in the American century by Steve Coll
Call Number: BIO BINLA FAM C (Adult biography)
ISBN: 9781594201646
Publication Date: 2008-04-01
The rise and rise of the Bin Laden family is one of the great stories of the twentieth century; its repercussions have already deeply marked the twenty-first. Until now, however, it is a story that has never been fully told, as the Bin Ladens have successfully fended off attempts to understand the family circles from which Osama sprang. In this the family has been abetted by the kingdom it calls home, Saudi Arabia, one of the most closed societies on earth. It chronicles a young illiterate Yemeni bricklayer, Mohamed Bin Laden, who went to the new, oil-rich country of Saudi Arabia and quickly became a vital figure in its development, building great mosques and highways and making himself and many of his children millionaires. It is also a story of the Saudi royal family, whom the Bin Ladens served loyally and without whose capricious favor they would have been nothing. And it is a story of tensions and contradictions in a country founded on extreme religious purity, which then became awash in oil money and dazzled by the temptations of the West. In only two generations the Bin Ladens moved from a famine-stricken desert canyon to luxury jets, yachts, and private compounds around the world, even going into business with Hollywood celebrities. These religious and cultural gyrations resulted in everything from enthusiasm for America—exemplified by Osama’s free-living pilot brother Salem—to an overwhelming determination to destroy it.

WINNER

Cheever: a life by Blake Bailey

FINALISTS:

Flannery: a life of Flannery O'Connor by Brad Gooch
Why This World: a biography of Clarice Lispect by Benjamin Moser
Bitter Spring: a life of Ignazio Silone by Stanislao G. Pugliese
Passing Strange: a gilded age tale of love and deception across the color line by Martha A. Sandweiss

Autobiography/Memoir 2000-2009

WINNER

Them: a memoir of parents by Francine du Plessix Gray

FINALISTS:

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
Fat Girl: a true story by Judith Moore
Istanbul: memories and the city by Orhan Pamuk
Two Lives by Vikram Seth

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
Call Number: BIO DIDIO JOA Y (Adult biography)
ISBN: 9781400043149
Publication Date: 2005-10-04
Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later—the night before New Year’s Eve—the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma. This powerful book is Didion’ s attempt to make sense of the “weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness ... about marriage and children and memory ... about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.
The Year of Magical Thinking [E-Book] by Joan Didion
Call Number: BIO DIDIO JOA Y Ebook (OverDrive)
ISBN: 9780307279729
Publication Date: 2007

Two Lives by Vikram Seth
Call Number: BIO VIKRA SET T (Adult biography)
ISBN: 9780060599669
Publication Date: 2005-10-25
Shanti Behari Seth, brought up in India, was sent by his family in the 1930s to Berlin--though he could not speak a word of German--to study medicine and dentistry. Helga Gerda Caro, known to everyone as "Henny" was also born in 1908, in Berlin, to a Jewish family--cultured, patriotic, and intensely German. When the family decided to take Shanti as a lodger, Henny's first reaction was, "Don't take the black man!" But a friendship flowered, and when Henny fled Germany just one month before war broke out, she was met at Victoria Station by the only person in the country she knew: Shanti. Vikram Seth has woven together their story, which recounts the arrival into this childless couple's lives of their great-nephew from India--the teenage Vikram. The result is a tapestry of India, the Third Reich and the Second World War, Auschwitz and the Holocaust, Israel and Palestine, postwar Germany and 1970s Britain.

WINNER

The Lost : a search for six of six million by Daniel Mendelsohn
Call Number: BIO JAEGE FAM M (Adult biography)
ISBN: 9780060542979
Publication Date: 2006-09-19
The Lost begins as the story of a boy who grew up in a family haunted by the disappearance of six relatives during the Holocaust—an unmentionable subject that gripped his imagination from earliest childhood. Decades later, spurred by the discovery of a cache of desperate letters written to his grandfather in 1939 and tantalized by fragmentary tales of a terrible betrayal, Daniel Mendelsohn sets out to find the remaining eyewitnesses to his relatives' fates. That quest eventually takes him to a dozen countries on four continents and forces him to confront the wrenching discrepancies between the histories we live and the stories we tell. And it leads him, finally, back to the small Ukrainian town where his family's story began, and where the solution to a decades-old mystery awaits him. Deftly moving between past and present, interweaving a world-wandering odyssey with childhood memories of a now-lost generation of immigrant Jews and provocative ruminations on biblical texts and Jewish history, The Lost transforms the story of one family into a profound, morally searching meditation on our fragile hold on the past. Deeply personal, grippingly suspenseful, and beautifully written, this literary tour de force illuminates all that is lost, and found, in the passage of time.

FINALISTS:

The Afterlife by Donald Antrim
Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
Stuart: a life backwards by Alexander Masters
Strange Piece of Paradise by Teri Jentz

Strange Piece of Paradise by Terri Jentz
Call Number: BIO JENTZ TER S (Adult biography)
ISBN: 9780374134983
Publication Date: 2006-05-01
In the summer of 1977, Terri Jentz and her Yale roommate, Shayna Weiss, make a cross-country bike trip. They pitch a tent in the desert of central Oregon. As they are sleeping, a man in a pickup truck deliberately runs over the tent. He then attacks them with an ax. The horrific crime is reported in newspapers across the country. No one is ever arrested. Both women survive, but Shayna suffers from amnesia, while Terri is left alone with memories of the attack. Their friendship is shattered. Fifteen years later, Terri returns to the small town where she was nearly murdered, on the first of many visits she will make "to solve the crime that would solve me." And she makes an extraordinary discovery: the violence of that night is as present for the community as it is for her. Slowly, her extensive interviews with the townspeople yield a terrifying revelation: many say they know who did it, and he is living freely in their midst. Terri then sets out to discover the truth about the crime and its aftermath, and to come to terms with the wounds that broke her life into a before and an after. Ultimately she finds herself face-to-face with the alleged axman.

WINNER

Brother, I'm Dying by Edwidge Danticat
Call Number: BIO DANTI EDW B (Adult biography)
ISBN: 9781400041152
Publication Date: 2007-09-04
Danticat came to think of her uncle Joseph, a charismatic pastor, as her "second father" when she was placed in his care at age four when her parents left Haiti for America. So she experiences a jumble of emotions when, at twelve, she joins her parents in New York City, whom she struggles to remember--she has left behind Joseph and the only home she's ever known. The story of a new life in a new country while fearing for those still in Haiti soon becomes a terrifying tale of good people caught up in events beyond their control. In 2004, his life threatened by a gang, the frail, 81-year-old Joseph makes his way to Miami, where he thinks he will be safe. Instead, he is detained by the Department of Homeland Security, brutally imprisoned, and dead within days. It was a story that made headlines around the world.
Brother, I'm Dying [E-Book] by Edwidge Danticat
Call Number: BIO DANTI EDW B Ebook (OverDrive)
ISBN: 9780307267733
Publication Date: 2007

FINALISTS:

Heart Like Water: surviving Katrina and the life in its disaster zone by Joshua Clark
The Journals of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973-1982 by Joyce Carol Oates
Writing in an Age of Silence by Sara Paretsky
Russian Diary: a journalist's final account of life, corruption and death in Putin's Russia by Anna Politkovskaya

WINNER

My Father's Paradise: a son's search for his Jewish past by Ariel Sabar

FINALISTS:

Why I Cam West by Rick Bass
The House on Sugar Beach by Helene Cooper
The Bishop's Daughter by Honor Moore
The Eaves of Heaven by Andrew X. Pham

The Eaves of Heaven : a life in three wars by Andrew X. Pham
Call Number: BIO PHAM THOV E (Adult biography)
ISBN: 9780307381200
Publication Date: 2008-06-03
Once wealthy landowners, Thong Van Pham's family was shattered by the tumultuous events of the twentieth century: the festering French occupation of Indochina, the Japanese invasion during World War II, and the Vietnam War. Told in dazzling chapters that alternate between events in the past and those closer to the present, The Eaves of Heaven brilliantly re-creates the trials of everyday life in Vietnam as endured by one man, from the fall of Hanoi and the collapse of French colonialism to the frenzied evacuation of Saigon.

WINNER

Somewhere Towards the End by Diana Athill

FINALISTS:

Live Through This: a mother's memoir of runaway daughters and reclaimed love by Debra Gwartney
Lit by Mary Karr
Enemies of the People: my family's journey to America by Kati Marton
City Boy by Edmund White

Live Through This [E-Book] : a mother's memoir of runaway daughters and reclaimed love by Debra Gwartney
Call Number: BIO GWART DEB L Ebook (OverDrive)
ISBN: 0547054475
Publication Date: 2009-02-11
After a miserably failed marriage, Debra Gwartney moves with her four young daughters to Eugene, Oregon, for a new job and what she hopes will be a new life for herself and her family. The two oldest, Amanda, 14, and Stephanie, 13, blame their mother for what happened, and one day the two run off together—to the streets of their own city, then San Francisco, then nowhere to be found. The harrowing subculture of the American runaway, with its random violence, its horrendously dangerous street drugs, and its patchwork of hidden shelters is captured by Gwartney with brilliant intensity in Live Through This as she sets out to find her girls. Though she thought she could hold her family together by love alone, Gwartney recognizes over the course of her search where she failed. It's a testament to her strength—and to the resilience of her daughters—that after several years they are a family again, forged by both forgiveness and love.
Lit : a memoir by Mary Karr
Call Number: BIO KARR MAR L (Adult biography)
ISBN: 9780060596989
Publication Date: 2009-11-03
Lit is about getting drunk and getting sober; becoming a mother by letting go of a mother; learning to write by learning to live. Written with Karr's relentless honesty, unflinching self-scrutiny, and irreverent, lacerating humor, it is a truly electrifying story of how to grow up—as only Mary Karr can tell it.

Poetry 2000-2009

WINNER

Carolina Ghost Woods by Judy Jordan

FINALISTS:

The Ledge by Michael Collier
Men in the Off Hours by Anne Carson
Talking Dirty to the Gods by Yusef Komunyakaa
Ultima Thule by Davis McCombs

WINNER

Saving Lives by Albert Goldbarth

FINALISTS:

The Seven Ages by Louise Gluck
Animal Soul by Bob Hicok
Given Sugar, Given Salt by Jane Hirshfield
A Treatise on Poetry by Czeslaw Milosz

WINNER

Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest by B. H. Fairchild

FINALISTS:

Leaving Saturn by Major Jackson
Sleeping With the Dictionary by Harryette Mullen
The Unswept Room by Sharon Olds
Without End: new and selected poems by Adam Zagajewski

WINNER

Columbarium by Susan Stewart

FINALISTS:

Blue Hour by Carolyn Forche
What Narcissism Means to Me by Tony Hoagland
She Says by Venus Khoury-Ghata; translated by Marilyn Hacker
Granted by Mary Szybist

WINNER

The School Among the Ruins: poems 2000-2004 by Adrienne Rich

FINALISTS:

The Orchard by Brigit Pegeen Kelly
Cocktails by D. A. Powell
Interglacial by James Richardson
Danger on Peaks by Gary Snyder

WINNER

Refusing Heaven by Jack Gilbert

FINALISTS:

The Shout by Simon Armitage
Bent to the Earth by Blas Manuel de Luna
Crush by Richard Siken
The Incentive of the Maggot by Ron Slate

WINNER

Tom Thomson in Purgatory by Troy Jollimore

FINALISTS:

My Brother is Getting Arrested Again by Daisy Fried
Poems (1945-1971) by Miltos Sachtouris
Ooga-Booga by Frederick Seidel
Not for Specialists: new and selected poems by W. D. Snodgrass

WINNER

Elegy by Mary Jo Bang

FINALISTS:

Modern Life by Matthea Harvey
Sleeping and Waking by Michael O'Brien
The Ballad of Jamie Allan by Tom Pickard
New Poems by Tadeusz Rozewicz

WINNERS

Half the World in Light by Juan Felipe Herrera
Sleeping It Off in Rapid City by August Kleinzahler

FINALISTS:

Sources by Devin Johnston
The Landscapist by Pierre Martory; translated by John Ashbery
Human Dark With Sugar by Brenda Shaughnessy

WINNER

Versed by Rae Armantrout

FINALISTS:

A Village LIfe by Louise Glück
Chronic by D. A. Powell
Captive Voices: new and selected poems, 1960-2008 by Eleanor Ross Taylor
Museum of Accidents by Rachel Zucker

Criticism 2000-2009

WINNER

Quarrel & Quandary by Cynthia Ozick

FINALISTS:

From Dawn to Decadence: 500 years of western cultural life, 1500 to present by Jacques Barzun
Passionate Minds by Claudia Roth Pierpont
Critical Entertainments: music old and new by Charles Rosen
A Poetry of Two Minds by Sherod Santos

WINNER

The War Against Cliche: essays and reviews, 1971-2000 by Martin Amis

FINALISTS:

Marginalia: readers writing in books by H. J. Jackson
De/Compositions: 101 Good Poems Gone Wrong by W. D. Snodgrass
As Eve Said to the Serpent: on landscape, gender, and art by Rebecca Solnit
III Nature: rants and reflections on humanity and other animals by Joy Williams

WINNER

Tests of Time by William H. Gass

FINALISTS:

Bright Earth: art and the invention of color by Philip Ball
Old Man Goya by Julia Blackburn
Reviewery by Christopher Ricks
Piano Notes: the world of the pianist by Charles Rosen

WINNER

River of Shadows by Rebecca Solnit

FINALISTS:

Gritos by Dagoberto Gilb
Songbook by Nick Hornby
Michelangelo & the Popes Ceiling by Ross King
Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag

WINNER

Where You're At: notes from the frontline of a hip-hop planet by Patrick Neate

FINALISTS:

Paper Trail: selected prose, 1965-2003 by Richard Howard
Strangers: homosexual love in the 19th century by Graham Robb
Sontag & Kael: opposites attract me by Craig Seligman
The Irresponsible Self: on laughter and the novel by James Wood

Paper Trail : common sense in uncommon times by Ellen Goodman
Call Number: 081 G565p (Adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 9780743249195
Publication Date: 2004-02-17
Paper Trail, her first collection in more than ten years, journeys through an era that has been golden in its advances and bleak in its disappointments. In a voice both reasoned and impassioned, she makes sense of the cultural debates that have captured our attention and sometimes become national obsessions. She wrestles with the close-to-the-bone issues of abortion, working mothers and gay marriage, the struggles for civil liberties and equal rights, and the moral complexity of assisted suicide and biotech babies. As she wends through the era of the Clinton scandals and the "amBushing" of America, the dot-com boom and bust, the horrors of September 11 and the War on Terrorism, Goodman pauses to celebrate some of our lost icons, including Jackie Onassis, Princess Diana and Doctor Spock. She reminds us as well of the fleeting fame of such instant celebrities as Elian Gonzalez and Lorena Bobbitt.

WINNER

The Undiscovered Country: poetry in the age of tine by William Logan

FINALISTS:

Gather at the River: notes from the post-millennial south by Hal Crowther
Unnatural Wonders by Arthur Danto
Still Looking: essays on American art by John Updike
What Happened Here: Bush chronicles by Eliot Weinberger

WINNER

Everything That Rises: a book of convergences by Lawrence Weschler

FINALISTS:

While Europe Slept: how radical Islam is destroying the west from within by Bruce Bawer
Follies of the Wise: dissenting essays by Frederick Crews
Breaking the Spell: religion as a natural phenomenon by Daniel Dennett
On Looking: essays by Lia Purpura

Breaking the Spell : religion as a natural phenomenon by Daniel C. Dennett
Call Number: 200 D399b (Adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 9780670034727
Publication Date: 2006-02-02
For all the thousands of books that have been written about religion, few until this one have attempted to examine it scientifically: to ask why—and how—it has shaped so many lives so strongly. Is religion a product of blind evolutionary instinct or rational choice? Is it truly the best way to live a moral life? Ranging through biology, history, and psychology, Daniel C. Dennett charts religion’s evolution from “wild” folk belief to “domesticated” dogma. Not an antireligious screed but an unblinking look beneath the veil of orthodoxy, Breaking the Spell will be read and debated by believers and skeptics alike.

WINNER

The Rest is Noise: listening to the twentieth century by Alex Ross

FINALISTS:

Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints by Joan Acocella
Once Upon a Quinceañera by Julia Alvarez
The Terror Dream by Susan Faludi
Coltrane: the story of a sound by Ben Ratliff

Once upon a Quinceanera : coming of age in the USA by Julia Alvarez
Call Number: 395.24 A473o (Adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 9780670038732
Publication Date: 2007-08-02
The quinceañera, the fifteenth birthday celebration for a Latina girl, is quickly becoming an American event. This legendary party is a sight to behold: lavish ball gowns, extravagant catered meals, DJs, limousines, and multi-tiered cakes. The must-haves for a "quince" are becoming as numerous and costly as a prom or wedding. And yet, this elaborate ritual also hearkens back to traditions from native countries and communities, offering young Latinas a chance to connect with their heritage. Writer Alvarez explores this celebration that brings a Latina girl into womanhood, attending the quince of a young woman in Queens, and weaving in interviews with other quince girls, her own memories of coming of age as an immigrant, and the history of the custom itself. The result is an enlightening, accessible, and entertaining portrait of contemporary Latino culture.

WINNER

Children's Literature: a reader's history: reader's history from Aesop to Harry Potter by Seth Lerer

FINALISTS:

Everything is Cinema: the working life of Jean-Luc Godard by Richard Brody
The Men in My Life by Vivian Gornick
Maimonides: the life and world of one of civilization's greatest minds by Joel L. Kraemer
Orpheus in the Bronx: essays on identity, politics, and the freedom of poetry by Reginald Shepherd

WINNER

Notes From No Man's Land: American essays by Eula Biss

FINALISTS:

Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry by Stephen Burt
Dancing in the Dark: a cultural history of the Great Depression by Morris Dickstein
Heroes and Villains: essays on music, movies, comics, and culture by David Hajdu
Perfecting Sound Forever: an aural history of recorded music by Greg Milner

National Book Critics Circle Award

Fiction 2000-2009

WINNER

Being Dead by Jim Crace

FINALISTS:

A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You by Amy Bloom

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon

Assorted Fire Events: stories by David Means

White Teeth by Zadie Smith

WINNER

Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald

FINALISTS:

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: stories by Alice Munro

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

John Henry Days by Colson Whitehead

WINNER

FINALISTS:

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

Nowhere Man by Aleksandar Hemon

Roscoe by William Kennedy

The Darts of Cupid: and other stories by Edith Templeton

WINNER

FINALISTS:

Brick Lane by Monica Ali

The Time of Our Singing by Richard Powers

Old School by Tobias Wolff

A Distant Shore by Caryl Phillips

WINNER

FINALISTS:

The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat

The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

The Plot Against America by Philip Roth

WINNER

FINALISTS:

Veronica by Mary Gaitskill

Small Island by Andrea Levy

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiiguro

Europe Central by William T. Vollmann

WINNER

FINALISTS:

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

What is the What by Dave Eggers

The Lay of the Land by Richard Ford

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

WINNER

FINALISTS:

Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra

In the Country of Men by Hisam Matar

The Gravedigger's Daughter by Joyce Carol Oates

The Shadow Catcher by Marianne Wiggins

WINNER

2666 by Roberto Bolaño

FINALISTS:

Home by Marilynne Robinson

The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon

The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart by M. Glenn Taylor

Olive Kittredge by Elizabeth Strout

WINNER

FINALISTS:

American Salvage by Bonnie Jo Campbell

The Book of Night Women by Marlon James

Blame by Michelle Huneven

Lark and Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips

General Nonfiction 2000-2009

WINNER

Newjack: guarding Sing Sing by Ted Conover

FINALISTS:

Crucible of War by Fred Anderson

Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the end of the Cold War by Frances Fitzgerald

Betrayal of Trust: the collapse of global public health by Laurie Garrett

The Collaborator: the trial and execution of Robert Brasillach by Alice Kaplan

WINNER

FINALISTS:

The Lost Children of Wilder: the epic struggle to change foster care by Nina Bernstein

Neighbors: the destruction of the Jewish community in Jedwabne, Poland by Jan T. Gross

Seabiscuit: an American legend by Laura Hillenbrand

The Brother: the untold story of atomic spy David Greenglass and how he sent his sister, Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair by Sam Roberts

WINNER