LibGuides: National Book Critics Circle Award: 1990s

The National Book Critics Circle Awards
1990 - 1999

Fiction 1990-1999

WINNER

Rabbit at Rest by John Updike

FINALISTS:

Middle Passage by Charles Johnson
Family Pictures by Sue Miller
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
Collected Stories by Wallace Stegner

Middle Passage by Charles R. Johnson
Call Number: FIC JOHNS CHAR MI (Adult fiction)
ISBN: 9780689119682
Publication Date: 1990-07-11
Rutherford Calhoun, a newly freed slave and irrepressible rogue, is lost in the underworld of 1830s New Orleans. Desperate to escape the city’s unscrupulous bill collectors and the pawing hands of a schoolteacher hellbent on marrying him, he jumps aboard the Republic, a slave ship en route to collect members of a legendary African tribe, the Allmuseri. Thus begins a voyage of metaphysical horror and human atrocity, a journey which challenges our notions of freedom, fate and how we live together. Peopled with vivid and unforgettable characters, nimble in its interplay of comedy and serious ideas, this dazzling modern classic is a perfect blend of the picaresque tale, historical romance, sea yarn, slave narrative and philosophical allegory.
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
Call Number: FIC OBRIE TIM TH (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780395515983
Publication Date: 1990-03-01
Related short stories with recurring characters and an interwoven plot and theme as told by a foot soldier recreating his Vietnam War experience.

WINNER

A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
Call Number: FIC SMILE JAN TH (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780394577739
Publication Date: 1991-10-23
Brothers Nestor and Cesar Camillo arrive from Cuba in 1949 with dreams of becoming famous mambo musicians. This memorable novel traces the arc of the two brothers’ lives—one charismatic and macho, the other soulful and sensitive—from Havana to New York, from East Coast clubs and dance halls to the heights of musical fame.

FINALISTS:

Wartime by Louis Begley
Typical American by Gish Jen
The Gold Bug Variations by Richard Powers
Mating by Norman Rush

Mating [Kindle] : a novel by Norman Rush
Call Number: FIC RUSH NOR MA Kindle (Request at circulation desk)
ISBN: 9780307789358
Publication Date: 1992
Set in the African republic of Botswana--the locale of his acclaimed short story collection, Whites--Norman Rush's novel simultaneously explores the highest of intellectual high grounds and the most tortuous ravines of the erotic and tackles the geopolitics of poverty and the mystery of what men and women really want.

WINNER

All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
Call Number: FIC MCART COR B1 (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780679744399
Publication Date: 1993-06-29
The tale of John Grady Cole, who at sixteen finds himself at the end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself. With two companions, he sets off for Mexico on a sometimes idyllic, sometimes comic journey to a place where dreams are paid for in blood.
All the Pretty Horses [E-Book] (Border trilogy #1) by Cormac McCarthy
Call Number: FIC MCART COR B1 Ebook (Adult fiction)
ISBN: 9780307481306
Publication Date: 2010

FINALISTS:

Let the Dead Bury Their Dead by Randall Kenan
Black Water by Joyce Carol Oates
Clockers by Richard Price
Outerbridge Reach by Robert Stone

Black Water by Joyce Carol Oates
Call Number: FIC OATES JOYC BW (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780452269866
Publication Date: 1993-05-01
Kelly Kelleher is an idealistic, twenty-six-year-old “good girl” when she meets the Senator at a Fourth of July party. In a brilliantly woven narrative, we enter her past and her present, her mind and her body as she is fatally attracted to this older man, this hero, this soon-to-be-lover. Kelly becomes the very embodiment of the vulnerable, romantic dreams of bright and brave women—drawn to the power that certain men command—at a party that takes on the quality of a surreal nightmare.
Clockers [Kindle] by Richard Price
Call Number: FIC PRICE RIC CL Kindle (Request at circulation desk)
ISBN: 9780547524085
Publication Date: 1992-06-02
Crack-dealers known as "Clockers" are at the bottom of the drug-dealing ladder, and they must commit murder to rise higher.

WINNER

A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines
Call Number: FIC GAINE ERNJ LE (Adult fiction)
ISBN: 9780679414773
Publication Date: 1993-03-23
Set in a small Cajun community in the late 1940s. Jefferson, a young black man, is an unwitting party to a liquor store shoot out in which three men are killed; the only survivor, he is convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Grant Wiggins, who left his hometown for the university, has returned to the plantation school to teach. As he struggles with his decision whether to stay or escape to another state, his aunt and Jefferson's godmother persuade him to visit Jefferson in his cell and impart his learning and his pride to Jefferson before his death. In the end, the two men forge a bond as they both come to understand the simple heroism of resisting and defying the expected.

FINALISTS:

The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
Feather Crowns by Bobbie Ann Mason
Vindication by Frances Sherwood
The Jade Cabinet by Rikki Ducornet

The Shipping News by Annie Proulx; B. Grossman (Editor)
Call Number: FIC PROUL ANN SH (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780684193373
Publication Date: 1993-03-02
Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a “head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair...features as bunched as kissed fingertips,” is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing wife meets her just desserts. An aunt convinces Quoyle and his two emotionally disturbed daughters to return with her to the starkly beautiful coastal landscape of their ancestral home in Newfoundland. Here, on desolate Quoyle’s Point, in a house empty except for a few mementos of the family’s unsavory past, the battered members of three generations try to cobble up new lives.

WINNER

The Stone Diaries [Kindle] by Carol Shields; Penelope Lively (Introduction by)
Call Number: FIC SHIEL CAR ST Kindle (Request at the circulation desk)
ISBN: 9780143105503
Publication Date: 2008-09-30
One of the most successful and acclaimed novels of our time, this fictionalized autobiography of Daisy Goodwill Flett is a subtle but affecting portrait of an everywoman reflecting on an unconventional life. What transforms this seemingly ordinary tale is the richness of Daisy's vividly described inner life--from her earliest memories of her adoptive mother to her awareness of impending death.

FINALISTS:

The Prince of West End Avenue by Alan Isler
And All Our Wounds by Julius Lester
A Frolic of His Own by WIlliam Gaddis
In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez

WINNER

Mrs. Ted Bliss by Stanley Elkin

FINALISTS:

Independence Day by Richard Ford
Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers
Moo by Jane Smiley
The Tent of Orange Mist by Paul West

Independence Day by Richard Ford
Call Number: FIC FORD RIC IN (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780679492658
Publication Date: 1995-06-13
Frank Bascombe, in the aftermath of his divorce and the ruin of his career, has entered an "Existence Period," selling real estate in Haddam, New Jersey, and mastering the high-wire act of normalcy. But over one Fourth of July weekend, Frank is called into sudden, bewildering engagement with life.
Galatea 2.2 [Kindle] by Richard Powers
Call Number: FIC POWER RIC GA Kindle (Request at circulation desk)
ISBN: 9780060976927
Publication Date: 1996-05-22
After four novels and several years living abroad, the fictional protagonist of Galatea 2.2—Richard Powers—returns to the United States as Humanist-in-Residence at the enormous Center for the Study of Advanced Sciences. There he runs afoul of Philip Lentz, an outspoken cognitive neurologist intent upon modeling the human brain by means of computer-based neural networks. Lentz involves Powers in an outlandish and irresistible project: to train a neural net on a canonical list of Great Books. Through repeated tutorials, the device grows gradually more worldly, until it demands to know its own name, sex, race, and reason for existing.

WINNER

Women in Their Beds by Gina Berriault

FINALISTS:

About Schmidt by Louis Begley
Dancing After Hours by Andre Dubus
The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid
From Bondage by Henry Roth

The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid
Call Number: FIC KINCA JAM AU (Adult fiction)
ISBN: 9780374107314
Publication Date: 1996-01-01
Powerful, disturbing, stirring, Jamaica Kincaid's novel is the deeply charged story of a woman's life on the island of Dominica. Xuela Claudette Richardson, the daughter of a Carib mother and a half-Scottish, half-African father, loses her mother to death the moment she is born and must find her way on her own. Kincaid takes us from Xuela's childhood in a home where she can hear the song of the sea to the tin-roofed room where she lives as a schoolgirl in the house of Jack LaBatte, who becomes her first lover. Xuela develops a passion for the stevedore Roland, who steals bolts of Irish linen for her from the ships he unloads, but she eventually marries an English doctor, Philip Bailey. Xuela's is an intensely physical world, redolent of overripe fruit, gentian violet, sulfur, and rain on the road, and it seethes with her sorrow, her deep sympathy for those who share her history, her fear of her father, her desperate loneliness. But underlying all is "the black room of the world" that is Xuela's barrenness and motherlessness.

WINNER

The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgeral

FINALISTS:

Underworld by Don DeLillo
Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
Dreams of My Russian Summers by Andrei Makine
American Pastoral by Philip Roth

Underworld by Don DeLillo
Call Number: FIC DELIL DON UN (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780684842691
Publication Date: 1997-10-03
Underworld is about the second half of the twentieth century in America and about two people, an artist and an executive, whose lives intertwine in New York in the fifties and again in the nineties. With cameo appearances by Lenny Bruce, J. Edgar Hoover, Bobby Thompson, Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason and Toots Shor.
Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
Call Number: FIC FRAZI CHA CO (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780871136794
Publication Date: 1997-05-16
Sorely wounded and fatally disillusioned in the fighting at Petersburg, a Confederate soldier named Inman decides to walk back to his home in the Blue Ridge mountains to Ada, the woman he loves. His trek across the disintegrating South brings him into intimate and sometimes lethal converse with slaves and marauders, bounty hunters and witches, both helpful and malign. At the same time, the intrepid Ada is trying to revive her father’s derelict farm and learning to survive in a world where the old certainties have been swept away.
Dreams of My Russian Summers [Kindle] by Andreï Makine; Geoffrey Strachan (Translator); Andreï Makine
Call Number: FIC MAKIN AND DR Kindle (Request at circulation desk)
ISBN: 9781628721164
Publication Date: 2011-05-15
Andrei, a 1960s Soviet schoolboy, recalls his summer visits with his grandmother, Charlotte, in a remote Siberian village, her magical tales of another time and world, and his difficulty reconciling the two contradictory and incompatible worlds that Charlotte's life has spanned.
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
Call Number: FIC ROTH PHI AM (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780395860212
Publication Date: 1997-05-12
American Pastoral is the story of a fortunate American's rise and fall—of a strong, confident master of social equilibrium overwhelmed by the forces of social disorder. Seymour "Swede" Levov—a legendary high school athlete, a devoted family man, a hard worker, the prosperous inheritor of his father's Newark glove factory—comes of age in thriving, triumphant postwar America. But everything he loves is lost when the country begins to run amok in the turbulent 1960s. Not even the most private, well-intentioned citizen, it seems, gets to sidestep the sweep of history. With vigorous realism, Roth takes us back to the conflicts and violent transitions of the 1960s. This is a book about loving—and hating—America. It's a book about wanting to belong—and refusing to belong—to America. It sets the desire for an American pastoral—a respectable life of space, calm, order, optimism, and achievement—against the indigenous American Berserk.

WINNER

The Love of a Good Woman by Alice Munro
Call Number: FIC MUNRO ALI LO (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780375403958
Publication Date: 1998-10-20
In eight new stories, a master of the form extends and magnifies her great themes--the vagaries of love, the passion that leads down unexpected paths, the chaos hovering just under the surface of things, and the strange, often comical desires of the human heart. Time stretches out in some of the stories: a man and a woman look back forty years to the summer they met--the summer, as it turns out, that the true nature of their lives was revealed. In others time is telescoped: a young girl finds in the course of an evening that the mother she adores, and whose fluttery sexuality she hopes to emulate, will not sustain her--she must count on herself. Some choices are made--in a will, in a decision to leave home--with irrevocable and surprising consequences. At other times disaster is courted or barely skirted: when a mother has a startling dream about her baby; when a woman, driving her grandchildren to visit the lakeside haunts of her youth, starts a game that could have dangerous consequences. The rich layering that gives Alice Munro's work so strong a sense of life is particularly apparent in the title story, in which the death of a local optometrist brings an entire town into focus--from the preadolescent boys who find his body, to the man who probably killed him, to the woman who must decide what to do about what she might know.

FINALISTS:

The Hours by Michael Cunningham
Preston Falls by David Gates
Birds of America by Lorrie Moore
No Lease on Life by Lynne Tillman

The Hours : a novel by Michael Cunningham
Call Number: Fiction C9736h (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780374172893
Publication Date: 1998-11-11
The Hours tells the story of three women: Virginia Woolf, beginning to write Mrs. Dalloway as she recuperates in a London suburb with her husband in 1923; Clarissa Vaughan, beloved friend of an acclaimed poet dying from AIDS, who in modern-day New York is planning a party in his honor; and Laura Brown, in a 1949 Los Angeles suburb, who slowly begins to feel the constraints of a perfect family and home. By the end of the novel, these three stories intertwine in remarkable ways, and finally come together in an act of subtle and haunting grace.

WINNER

Motherless Brooklyn [E-Book] by Jonathan Lethem
Call Number: FIC LETHE JON MO Ebook (OverDrive)
ISBN: 9780307789129
Publication Date: 2011
Brooklyn's very own self-appointed Human Freakshow, Lionel Essrog is an orphan whose Tourettic impulses drive him to bark, count, and rip apart our language in startling and original ways. Together with three veterans of the St. Vincent's Home for Boys, he works for small-time mobster Frank Minna's limo service cum detective agency. Life without Frank Minna, the charismatic King of Brooklyn, would be unimaginable, so who cares if the tasks he sets them are, well, not exactly legal. But when Frank is fatally stabbed, one of Lionel's colleagues lands in jail, the other two vie for his position, and the victim's widow skips town. Lionel's world is suddenly topsy-turvy, and this outcast who has trouble even conversing attempts to untangle the threads of the case while trying to keep the words straight in his head.

FINALISTS:

Midnight Champagne by A. Manette Ansay
The Night Inspector by Frederick Busch
Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee
The Wonders of the Invisible World: stories by David Gates

General Nonfiction 1990-1999

WINNER

The Content of Our Character: a new vision of race in America by Shelby Steel

FINALISTS:

City of Quartz: excavating the future of Los Angeles by Mike Davis
Samba by Alma Guillermoprieto
Disappearing Through the Skylight: culture and technology in the 20th century by O. B. Hardison
The Politics of Rich and Poor: wealth and the American electorate in the Reagan Aftermath by Kevin Phillips

WINNER

Backlash: the undeclared war against American women by Susan Faludi

FINALISTS:

Which Side Are You On?: trying to be for labor when it's flat on its back by Thomas Geoghegan
Praying for Sheetrock by Melissa Fay Green
Savage Inequalities: children in America's schools by Jonathan Kozol
Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos: the scientific quest for the secret of the universe by Dennis Overbye

Savage Inequalities : children in America's schools by Jonathan Kozol
Call Number: 371.96 K88s (Adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 9780517582213
Publication Date: 1991-08-27
In 1988, Jonathan Kozol set off to spend time with children in the American public education system. For two years, he visited schools in neighborhoods across the country, from Illinois to Washington, D.C., and from New York to San Antonio. He spoke with teachers, principals, superintendents, and, most important, children. What he found was devastating. Not only were schools for rich and poor blatantly unequal, the gulf between the two extremes was widening—and it has widened since. The urban schools he visited were overcrowded and understaffed, and lacked the basic elements of learning—including books and, all too often, classrooms for the students. In Savage Inequalities, Kozol delivers a searing examination of the extremes of wealth and poverty and calls into question the reality of equal opportunity in our nation’s schools.

WINNER

Young Men and Fire by Norman Maclean

FINALISTS:

Breaking the Maya Coe by Michael D. Coe
Home Fires: an intimate portrait of one middle-class family in postwar America by Donald Katz
Death Without Weeping: the violence of everyday life in Brazil by Nancy Scheper-Hughes
The Diversity of Life by Edward O. Wilson

WINNER

The Land Where the Blues Began by Alan Lomax

FINALISTS:

Whoredom in Kimmage: Irish women coming of age by Rosemary Mahoney
The Last Panda by George B. Schaller
Genie: an abused child's flight from silence by Russ Rymer
Lenin's Tomb: the last days of the Soviet Empire by David Remnick

Lenin's Tomb : the last days of the Soviet empire by David Remnick
Call Number: 947.085 R338L (Adult Nonfiction)
ISBN: 9780679751250
Publication Date: 1994-04-26
In the tradition of John Reed's classic Ten Days That Shook the World, this best-selling account of the collapse of the Soviet Union combines the global vision of the best historical scholarship with the immediacy of eyewitness journalism.

WINNER

The Rape of Europa by Lynn Nicholas

FINALISTS:

Strange Justice by Jane Mayer & Jill Abramson
My Own Country by Abraham Verghese
How We Die by Sherwin Nuland
The Unredeemed by John Demos

Strange Justice : the selling of Clarence Thomas by Jane Mayer
Call Number: 347.73 M464s (Adult Nonfiction)
ISBN: 9780395633182
Publication Date: 1994-11-01
Charged with racial, sexual, and political overtones, the confirmation of Clarence Thomas as a Supreme Court justice was one of the most divisive spectacles the country has ever seen. Anita Hill's accusation of sexual harassment by Thomas, and the attacks on her that were part of his high-placed supporters rebuttal, both shocked the nation and split it into two camps. One believed Hill was lying, the other believed that the man who ultimately took his place on the Supreme Court had committed perjury. In this brilliant, often shocking book, Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson, two of the nation's top investigative journalists, examine all aspects of this controversial case. They interview witnesses that the Judiciary Committee chose not to call and present documents never before made public. They detail the personal and professional pasts of both Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill and lay bare a campaign of lobbying, public relations, and character assassination fueled by conservative power at its most desperate. A gripping high-stakes drama, Strange Justice is not only a definitive account of the Clarence Thomas nomination hearings but is also a classic casebook of how the Washington game is played by those for whom winning is everything.

WINNER

A Civil Action by Jonathan Harr

FINALISTS:

A Gentle Madness: bibliophiles, bibliomanes, and the eternal passion for books by Nicholas Basbanes
In These Girls, Hope is a Muscle by Madeleine Blais
All God's Children: the Bosket Family and the American tradition of violence by Fox Butterfield
Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder by Lawrence Weschler

WINNER

Bad Land by Jonathan Raban

FINALISTS:

Great Books by David Denby
Hitler's Willing by Daniel Goldhagen
Ashes to Ashes by Richard Kluger
The Middle East by Bernard Lewis

Great Books : my adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and other indestructible writers of the Western world by David Denby
Call Number: 909 D391g (Adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 9780684809755
Publication Date: 1996-09-09
At the age of 48, film critic David Denby returned to his alma mater, Columbia University, to re-experience the core humanities courses he had taken as a freshman 30 years before. Facing the question of what he really knows, Denby re-examines the besieged Western classics, ranging from Homer, Sappho, and Sophocles to Dante, Nietzsche, and Woolf. What relevance do the writers and thinkers of the past have to our current life? The answer surprised Denby and will surprise and enlighten his listeners. Great Books is a fascinating look at the crisis of literature in the late 20th century, mixing personal reflection, criticism, and the story of one man's effort "to create a self."

WINNER

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman

FINALISTS:

Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
The Bible as It Was by James Kugel
American Scripture by Pauline Maier
How the Mind Works by Stephen Pinker

Into Thin Air : a personal account of the Mount Everest disaster by Jon Krakauer
Call Number: 796.52 k89I (Adult Non-Fiction)
ISBN: 9780767867153
Publication Date: 1997
When Jon Krakauer reached the summit of Mt. Everest in the early afternoon of May 10,1996, he hadn't slept in fifty-seven hours and was reeling from the brain-altering effects of oxygen depletion. As he turned to begin the perilous descent from 29,028 feet (roughly the cruising altitude of an Airbus jetliner), twenty other climbers were still pushing doggedly to the top, unaware that the sky had begun to roil with clouds...
Into Thin Air [E-Book] : a personal account of the Mount Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer
Call Number: YA B KRA-K Ebook (OverDrive)
ISBN: 9780679462712
Publication Date: 1998
Into Thin Air [streaming audiobook] : a personal account of the Mt. Everest disaster by Jon Krakauer
Call Number: YA B KRA-K Audiobk (OverDrive)
ISBN: 9780593454305
Publication Date: 2007

How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker
Call Number: 153 P655h (Adult Nonfiction)
ISBN: 9780393045352
Publication Date: 1997-10-01
In this delightful, acclaimed best seller, one of the world’s leading cognitive scientists tackles the workings of the human mind. What makes us rational—and why are we so often irrational? How do we see in three dimensions? What makes us happy, afraid, angry, disgusted, or sexually aroused? Why do we fall in love? And how do we grapple with the imponderables of morality, religion, and consciousness? How the Mind Works synthesizes the most satisfying explanations of our mental life from cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and other fields to explain what the mind is, how it evolved, and how it allows us to see, think, feel, laugh, interact, enjoy the arts, and contemplate the mysteries of life.

WINNER

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevich

FINALISTS:

King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild
Many Thousands Gone: the first two centuries of slavery in North America by Ira Berlin
The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: a medical history of humanity by Roy Porter
The Professor and the Madman: a tale of murder, insanity, and the making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon WInchester

King Leopold's Ghost : a story of greed, terror, and heroism in Colonial Africa by Adam Hochschild
Call Number: 967.51 H685k (Adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 9780395759240
Publication Date: 1998-09-21
Chronicles the life of King Leopold II of Belgium and discusses how he plundered the Congo, how his people tried to overthrow him, and other related topics.
The Professor and the Madman : a tale of murder, insanity, and the making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester
Call Number: BIO MURRA JAMA W (Adult biography)
ISBN: 9780060175962
Publication Date: 1998-08-26
The Professor and the Madman is an extraordinary tale of madness, genius, and the incredible obsessions of two remarkable men that led to the making of the Oxford English Dictionary—and literary history. The making of the OED was one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken. As definitions were collected, the overseeing committee, led by Professor James Murray, was stunned to discover that one man, Dr. W. C. Minor, had submitted more than ten thousand. But their surprise would pale in comparison to what they were about to discover when the committee insisted on honoring him. For Dr. Minor, an American Civil War veteran, was also an inmate at an asylum for the criminally insane.

WINNER

Time, Love, Memory: a great biologist and his quest for the origins of behavior by Jonathan Weiner

FINALISTS:

Five Thousand Days Like This One: an American family history by Jane Brox
Embracing Defeat: Japan in the wake of World War II by John W. Dower
I Could Tell You Stories: sojourns in the land of memory by Patricia Hampl
The Black Room at Longwood: Napoleon's exile on Saint Helena by Jean-Paul Kauffmann

Embracing Defeat : Japan in the wake of World War II by John W. Dower
Call Number: 952.04 D746e (Adult Nonfiction)
ISBN: 9780393046861
Publication Date: 1999-03-17
Japan -- History -- 1945-

Biography/Autobiography 1990-1999

WINNER

Means of Ascent: the years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro

FINALISTS:

Strong Drink, Strong Language by John Espey
The Five of Hearts: an intimate portrait of Henry Adams and his friends, 1880-1918 by Patricia O'Toole
A Hole in the World by Richard Rhodes
Righteous Pilgrim: the life and times of Harold L. Ickes by T. H. Watkins

A Hole in the World : an American boyhood by Richard Lee Rhodes
Call Number: BIO RHODE RIC H (Adult biography)
ISBN: 9780671747251
Publication Date: 1991-10-01
A mother's suicide leads to chaos and family violence in Rhodes's moving and terrifying memoir of loss and eventual triumph as he describes his traumatic childhood

WINNER

Patrimony : a true story by Philip Roth
Call Number: BIO ROTH HER P (Adult biography)
ISBN: 9780671703752
Publication Date: 1991-02-01
The novelist tells the story of his father, who created him and whom he recreates in an act of memory, elegy, and appreciation.

FINALISTS:

The Journals of John Cheever by John Cheever
The Man Who Knew Infinity: a life of the genius Ramanujan by Robert Kanigel
Anne Sexton: a biography by Diane Middlebrook
Maus II by Art Spiegelman

Anne Sexton by Diane W. Middlebrook
Call Number: BIO SEXTO ANN M (Adult biography)
ISBN: 9780395353622
Publication Date: 1991-09-01
Anne Sexton began writing poetry at the age of twenty-nine to keep from killing herself. She held on to language for dear life and somehow -- in spite of alcoholism and the mental illness that ultimately led her to suicide -- managed to create a body of work that won a Pulitzer Prize and that still sings to thousands of readers. This exemplary biography, which was nominated for the National Book Award, provoked controversy for its revelations of infidelity and incest and its use of tapes from Sexton's psychiatric sessions. It reconciles the many Anne Sextons: the 1950s housewife; the abused child who became an abusive mother; the seductress; the suicide who carried "kill-me pills" in her handbag the way other women carry lipstick; and the poet who transmuted confession into lasting art.
Maus : a survivor's tale, II : and here my troubles began by Art Spiegelman
Call Number: YA B SPI-A M2 (Young adult biography)
ISBN: 9780394556550
Publication Date: 1991-11-05
A brutally moving work of art—widely hailed as the greatest graphic novel ever written—Maus recounts the chilling experiences of the author’s father during the Holocaust, with Jews drawn as wide-eyed mice and Nazis as menacing cats. Maus is a haunting tale within a tale, weaving the author’s account of his tortured relationship with his aging father into an astonishing retelling of one of history's most unspeakable tragedies. It is an unforgettable story of survival and a disarming look at the legacy of trauma.

WINNER

Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and her world by Carol Brightman

FINALISTS:

The Rascal King: the life and times of James Michael Curley, 1874-1958 by Jack Beatty
Looking for the Light: the hidden life and art of Marion Post Wolcott by Paul Hendrickson
Kissinger by Walter Isaacson
Truman by David McCullough

The Rascal King : the life and times of James Michael Curley, 1874-1958 by Jack Beatty
Call Number: BIO CURLE JAMM B (Adult biography)
ISBN: 9780201175998
Publication Date: 1992-10-20
Twice jailed while serving in office yet a champion of the people, builder of schools yet a shameless grafter, James Michael Curley was the stuff of legend long before his life became fiction in Edwin O'Connor's classic novel The Last Hurrah. As mayor of Boston, as a United States congressman, as governor of Massachusetts, Curley rose from the slums of South Boston in a career extending from the Progressive Era of Teddy Roosevelt to the ascendancy of the Kennedy sons. While Curley lived, he represented both the triumph of Irish Americans and the birth of divisive politics of ethnic and racial polarization; when he died, over one million mourners turned out to pay their respects in the largest wake Boston had ever seen.
Kissinger : a biography by Walter Isaacson
Call Number: BIO KISSI HEN I (Adult biography)
ISBN: 9780671663230
Publication Date: 1992
By the time Henry Kissinger was made secretary of state in 1973, he had become, according to the Gallup Poll, the most admired person in America and one of the most unlikely celebrities ever to capture the world's imagination. Yet Kissinger was also reviled by large segments of the American public, ranging from liberal intellectuals to conservative activists. Kissinger explores the relationship between this complex man’s personality and the foreign policy he pursued. Drawing on extensive interviews with Kissinger as well as 150 other sources, including US presidents and his business clients, this first full-length biography makes use of many of Kissinger’s private papers and classified memos to tell his uniquely American story. The result is an intimate narrative, filled with surprising revelations, that takes this grandly colorful statesman from his childhood as a persecuted Jew in Nazi Germany, through his tortured relationship with Richard Nixon, to his later years as a globe-trotting business consultant.
Truman by David McCullough
Call Number: BIO TRUMA HARS M (Adult biography)
ISBN: 9780671456542
Publication Date: 1992-06-15
The life of Harry S. Truman is one of the greatest of American stories, filled with vivid characters—Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Eleanor Roosevelt, Bess Wallace Truman, George Marshall, Joe McCarthy, and Dean Acheson—and dramatic events. In this riveting biography, acclaimed historian David McCullough not only captures the man—a more complex, informed, and determined man than ever before imagined—but also the turbulent times in which he rose, boldly, to meet unprecedented challenges. The last president to serve as a living link between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, Truman’s story spans the raw world of the Missouri frontier, World War I, the powerful Pendergast machine of Kansas City, the legendary Whistle-Stop Campaign of 1948, and the decisions to drop the atomic bomb, confront Stalin at Potsdam, send troops to Korea, and fire General MacArthur. Drawing on newly discovered archival material and extensive interviews with Truman’s own family, friends, and Washington colleagues, McCullough tells the deeply moving story of the seemingly ordinary “man from Missouri” who was perhaps the most courageous president in our history.

WINNER

Genet by Edmund White

FINALISTS:

A Different Person by James Merrill
The Passion of Michael Foucault by James Miller
French Lessons by Alice Kaplan
DuBois: biography of a race by David Levering Lewis

WINNER

Shot in the Heart by Mikal Gilmore
Call Number: BIO GILMO FAM S (Adult biography)
ISBN: 9780385422932
Publication Date: 1994-05-01
Gary Gilmore, the infamous murderer immortalized by Norman Mailer in The Executioner's Song, campaigned for his own death and was executed by firing squad in 1977. Writer Mikal Gilmore is his younger brother. In Shot in the Heart, he tells the stunning story of their wildly dysfunctional family: their mother, a black sheep daughter of unforgiving Mormon farmers; their father, a drunk, thief, and con man. It was a family destroyed by a multigenerational history of child abuse, alcoholism, crime, adultery, and murder. Mikal, burdened with the guilt of being his father's favorite and the shame of being Gary's brother, gracefully and painfully relates a murder tale "from inside the house where murder is born... a house that, in some ways, [he has] never been able to leave." Shot in the Heart is the history of an American family inextricably tied up with violence, and the story of how the children of this family committed murder and murdered themselves in payment for a long lineage of ruin.

FINALISTS:

Toulouse-Lautrec by Julia Frey
D.H. Lawrence by Brenda Maddox
Naturalist by Edward O. Wilson
Winchell by Neal Gabler

WINNER

Savage Art: a biography of Jim Thompson by Robert Polito

FINALISTS:

Moving Violations: war zones, wheelchairs and declarations of independence by John Hockenberry
The Liars' Club by Mary Karr
Walt Whitman's America by David S. Reynolds
Emerson: the mind on fire by Robert Richardson, Jr.

WINNER

Angela's Ashes : a memoir (Frank McCourt memoirs) by Frank McCourt
Call Number: BIO MCOUR FRA A (Adult biography)
ISBN: 9780684874357
Publication Date: 1996-09-05

FINALISTS:

Pearl S. Buck: a cultural biography by Peter Conn
Lush life: a biography of Billy Strayhorn by David Hajdu
The Last Happy Occasion by Alan Shapiro
Charles Ives: a life in music by Jan Swafford

WINNER

Ernie Pyle's War : America's eyewitness to World War II by James Tobin
Call Number: BIO PYLE ERN T (Adult biography)
ISBN: 9780743284769
Publication Date: 2006-06-07
When a machine-gun bullet ended the life of war correspondent Ernie Pyle in the final days of World War II, Americans mourned him in the same breath as they mourned Franklin Roosevelt. To millions, the loss of this American folk hero seemed nearly as great as the loss of the wartime president. If the hidden horrors and valor of combat persist at all in the public mind, it is because of those writers who watched it and recorded it in the faith that war is too important to be confined to the private memories of the warriors. Above all these writers, Ernie Pyle towered as a giant. Through his words and his compassion, Americans everywhere gleaned their understanding of what they came to call "The Good War." Pyle walked a troubled path to fame. Though insecure and anxious, he created a carefree and kindly public image in his popular prewar column--all the while struggling with inner demons and a tortured marriage. War, in fact, offered Pyle an escape hatch from his own personal hell. It also offered him a subject precisely suited to his talent--a shrewd understanding of human nature, an unmatched eye for detail, a profound capacity to identify with the suffering soldiers whom he adopted as his own, and a plain yet poetic style reminiscent of Mark Twain and Will Rogers.

FINALISTS:

American Sphinx by Joseph Ellis
Virginia Woolf by Hermione Lee
Walking in the Shade by Doris Lessing

American Sphinx [E-Book] : the character of Thomas Jefferson by Joseph J. Ellis
Call Number: BIO JEFFE THO E Ebook (OverDrive)
ISBN: 9780375727467
Publication Date: 1998-11-19
Following Thomas Jefferson from the drafting of the Declaration of Independence to his retirement in Monticello, Joseph J. Ellis unravels the contradictions of the Jeffersonian character. He gives us the slave holding libertarian who was capable of decrying miscegenation while maintaining an intimate relationship with his slave, Sally Hemmings; the enemy of government power who exercised it audaciously as president; the visionary who remained curiously blind to the inconsistencies in his nature. American Sphinx is a marvel of scholarship, a delight to read, and an essential gloss on the Jeffersonian legacy.

WINNER

A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nassar

FINALISTS:

Titan: the life of John D. Rockefeller by Ron Chernow
Rocket Boys: a memoir by Homer H. Hickam, Jr.
King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the rise of an American hero by David Remnick
Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy: a lost generation love story by Amanda Vaill

Titan : the life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron Chernow
Call Number: BIO ROCKE JOHD C (Adult biography)
ISBN: 9781400077304
Publication Date: 2004-03-30
Born the son of a flamboyant, bigamous snake-oil salesman and a pious, straitlaced mother, Rockefeller rose from rustic origins to become the world's richest man by creating America's most powerful and feared monopoly, Standard Oil.
Rocket Boys [E-Book] by Homer Hickam
Call Number: BIO HICKA HOMH R Ebook (OverDrive)
ISBN: 9780440333876
Publication Date: 1999
With the grace of a natural storyteller, NASA engineer Homer Hickam paints a warm, vivid portrait of the harsh West Virginia mining town of his youth, evoking a time of innocence and promise, when anything was possible, even in a company town that swallowed its men alive. A story of romance and loss, of growing up and getting out, Homer Hickam's lush, lyrical memoir is a chronicle of triumph—at once exquisitely written and marvelously entertaining.

WINNER

The Hairstons: an American family by Henry Wiencek

FINALISTS:

Coleridge: Volume II: Darker reflections by Richard Holmes
Morgan: American financier by Jean Strouse
Secrets of the flesh: a life of Colette by Judith Thurman
The Trust: the private and powerful family behind the New York Times by Susan E. Tifft & Alex S. Jones

Poetry 1990-1999

WINNER

Bitter Angel by Amy Gerstler

FINALISTS:

In the Western Night by Frank Bidart
New Poems, 1980-88 by John Haines
The Transparent Man by Anthony Hecht
The Book of Gods and Devils by Charles Simic

WINNER

Heaven and Earth: a cosmology by Albert Goldbarth

FINALISTS:

Jaguar of Sweet Laughter: new & selected poems by Diane Ackerman
The Ether Dome and Other Poems: new & selected (1979-1991) by Allen Grossman
What Work Is by Philip Levine
An Atlas of the Difficult World by Adrienne Rich

WINNER

Collected Shorter Poems 1946-1991 by Hayden Carruth

FINALISTS:

Gilgamesh by David Ferry
Looking for Luck by Maxine Kumin
The Father by Sharon Olds
A Dream of Mine by K. C. Williams

WINNER

My Alexandria by Mark Doty

FINALISTS:

The Museum of Clear Ideas by Donald Hall
The Book of Medicines by Linda Hogan
The Marvelous Arithmetic of Distance by Audre Lorde
Sesame by Jack Marshall

WINNER

Rider by Mark Rudman

FINALISTS:

What We Carry by Dorianne Laux
Winter Numbers by Marilyn Hacker
The Simple Truth by Philip Levine
Sunday Skaters by Mary Jo Salter

The Simple Truth : poems by Philip Levine
Call Number: 811.54 L665s (Adult Nonfiction)
ISBN: 9780679765844
Publication Date: 1996-09-03
American poetry -- 20th century.

WINNER

Time & Money by William Matthews

FINALISTS:

The Only World by Lynda Hull
A Scattering of Salts by James Merrill
Cortege by Carl Phillips
Kyrie by Ellen Bryant Voigt

WINNER

Sun Under Wood by Robert Hass

FINALISTS:

Loosestrife by Stephen Dunn
Imagine the Angels of Bread by Martín Espada
Music Minus One by Jane Shore
The Vigil by C. K. Williams

WINNER

Black Zodiac by Charles Wright
Call Number: 811.54 W948b (Adult Nonfiction)
ISBN: 9780374525361
Publication Date: 1998-03-04
American poetry -- 20th century.

FINALISTS:

Desire by Frank Bidart
Loose Sugar by Brenda Hillman
Questions for Ecclesiastes by Mark Jarman
Does Your House Have Lions? by Sonya Sanchez

WINNER

The Bird Catcher by Marie Ponsot

FINALISTS:

Self-Evidence by Pamela White Hadas
Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler by Thylias Moss
The Autobiography of Red: a novel in verse by Ann Carson
Thieves of Paradise by Yuself Komunyakaa

Autobiography of Red : a novel in verse by Carson, Anne
Call Number: Fiction C321a (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780375701290
Publication Date: 1999-07-27
There is a strong mixture of whimsy and sadness in Geryon's story. He is tormented as a boy by his brother, escapes to a parallel world of photography, and falls in love with Herakles--a golden young man who leaves Geryon at the peak of infatuation. Geryon retreats ever further into the world created by his camera, until that glass house is suddenly and irrevocably shattered by Herakles' return. Running throughout is Geryon's fascination with his wings, the color red, and the fantastic accident of who he is.

WINNER

Ordinary Words by Ruth Stone

FINALISTS:

Diva by Rafael Campo
HIV, Mon Amour by Tory Dent
On the Bus with Rosa Parks by Rita Dove
Dailies & Rushes by Susan Kingsolving

Criticism 1990-1999

WINNER

Encounters and Reflections: art in the historical present by Arthur Danto

FINALISTS:

Notes of a Hanging Judge: essays and reviews, 1979-1989 by Stanley Crouch
Selected Writings, 1950-1990 by Irving Howe
Emily Dickinson by Camille Paglia
Essays in Disguise by Wilfrid Sheed

WINNER

Holocaust Testimonies: the ruins of memory by Lawrence L. Langer

FINALISTS:

Inventing the Middle Ages: the lives, works & ideas of the great medievalists of the twentieth century by Norman F. Cantor
Vulgar Modernism: writing on movies and other media by J. Hoberman
Female Perversions: the temptations of Emma Bovary by Louise J. Kaplan
Odd Jobs by John Updike

WINNER

Lincoln at Gettysburg : the words that remade America by Garry Wills
Call Number: 973.7349 W741L (Adult Nonfiction)
ISBN: 9780671867423
Publication Date: 1993-06-12
The power of words has rarely been given a more compelling demonstration than in the Gettysburg Address. Lincoln was asked to memorialize the gruesome battle. Instead he gave the whole nation “a new birth of freedom” in the space of a mere 272 words. His entire life and previous training and his deep political experience went into this, his revolutionary masterpiece. By examining both the address and Lincoln in their historical moment and cultural frame, Wills breathes new life into words we thought we knew, and reveals much about a president so mythologized but often misunderstood. Wills shows how Lincoln came to change the world and to effect an intellectual revolution, how his words had to and did complete the work of the guns, and how Lincoln wove a spell that has not yet been broken.

FINALISTS:

The Critics Bear It Away: American fiction and the academy by Frederick Crews
Can Poetry Matter?: essays on poetry and American culture by Dana GIoia
A Chorus of Stones: the private life of war by Susan Griffin
Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: living and writing in the West by Wallace Stegner

WINNER

Opera in America: a cultural history by John Dizikes

FINALISTS:

The Queen's Throat by Wayne Koestenbaum
The Phantom Empire by Geoffrey O'Brien
Authors and Owners: the invention of copyright by Mark Rose
United States: essays 1952-1992 by Gore Vidal

WINNER

The Culture of Bruising by Gerald Early

FINALISTS:

Poetry of Mourning by Jahan Ramazani
The Western Canon by Harold Bloom
Reasonable Creatures by Katha Pollitt
Sex and Suits by Anne Hollander

The Western Canon : the books and school of the ages by Harold Bloom
Call Number: 809 B6552w (Adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 9780151001330
Publication Date: 1994-09-01
Harold Bloom explores our Western literary tradition by concentrating on the works of twenty-six authors central to the Canon. He argues against ideology in literary criticism; he laments the loss of intellectual and aesthetic standards; he deplores multiculturalism, Marxism, feminism, neoconservatism, Afrocentrism, and the New Historicism. Insisting instead upon "the autonomy of aesthetic," Bloom places Shakespeare at the center of the Western Canon. Shakespeare has become the touchstone for all writers who come before and after him, whether playwrights, poets, or storytellers. In the creation of character, Bloom maintains, Shakespeare has no true precursor and has left no one after him untouched. Milton, Samuel Johnson, Goethe, Ibsen, Joyce, and Beckett were all indebted to him; Tolstoy and Freud rebelled against him; and while Dante, Wordsworth, Austen, Dickens, Whitman, Dickinson, Proust, and the modern Hispanic and Portuguese writers Borges, Neruda, and Pessoa are exquisite examples of how canonical writing is born of an originality fused with tradition.

WINNER

The Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-Revolution France by Robert Darnton

FINALISTS:

The All-American Skin Game, or The Decoy of Race: the long and the short of it, 1990-1994 by Stanley Crouch
The Castle of Indolence: on poetry, poets and poetastersThomas M. Disch
Paul Celan: poet, survivor, Jew by John Felstiner
After the Fact by Clifford Geertz

WINNER

Finding a Form by William Gass

FINALISTS:

Art for Art's Sake and Literary Life by Gene H. Bell-Villada
The True Story of the Novel by Margaret Anne Doody
The Love Affair as a Work of Art by Dan Hofstadter
Fame and Folly by Cynthia Ozick

WINNER

Making Waves by Mario Vargas Llosa

FINALISTS:

The Pleasures of the Imagination by John Brewer
The End of the Novel of Loveby Vivian Gornick
God and the American Writer by Alfred Kazin
The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets by Helen Vendler

WINNER

Visions of Jazz: the first century by Gary Giddins

FINALISTS:

Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dyer
Hip Hop America by Nelson George
Shakespeare: the invention of the human by Harold Bloom
The Sounds of Poetry by Robert Pinsky

Hip Hop America by Nelson George
Call Number: 784.54 G348h (Adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 9780670871537
Publication Date: 1998-10-01
From Nelson George, supervising producer and writer of the hit Netflix series, "The Get Down, Hip Hop America is the definitive account of the society-altering collision between black youth culture and the mass media.

WINNER

Selected Non-Fictions by Jorge Louis Borges

FINALISTS:

Film Follies: the Cinema Out of Order by Stuart Klawans
Reputations of the Tongue: on poets and poetry by William Logan
Lives of the Poets by Michael Schmidt
Black Planet: facing race during an NBA season by David Shields

National Book Critics Circle Award

Fiction 1990-1999

WINNER

Rabbit at Rest by John Updike

FINALISTS:

Middle Passage by Charles Johnson

Family Pictures by Sue Miller

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

Collected Stories by Wallace Stegner

WINNER

FINALISTS:

Wartime by Louis Begley

Typical American by Gish Jen

The Gold Bug Variations by Richard Powers

Mating by Norman Rush

WINNER

FINALISTS:

Let the Dead Bury Their Dead by Randall Kenan

Black Water by Joyce Carol Oates

Clockers by Richard Price

Outerbridge Reach by Robert Stone

WINNER

FINALISTS:

The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx

Feather Crowns by Bobbie Ann Mason

Vindication by Frances Sherwood

The Jade Cabinet by Rikki Ducornet

WINNER

FINALISTS:

The Prince of West End Avenue by Alan Isler

And All Our Wounds by Julius Lester

A Frolic of His Own by WIlliam Gaddis

In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez

WINNER

Mrs. Ted Bliss by Stanley Elkin

FINALISTS:

Independence Day by Richard Ford

Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers

Moo by Jane Smiley

The Tent of Orange Mist by Paul West

WINNER

Women in Their Beds by Gina Berriault

FINALISTS:

About Schmidt by Louis Begley

Dancing After Hours by Andre Dubus

The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid

From Bondage by Henry Roth

WINNER

The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgeral

FINALISTS:

Underworld by Don DeLillo

Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier

Dreams of My Russian Summers by Andrei Makine

American Pastoral by Philip Roth

WINNER

FINALISTS:

The Hours by Michael Cunningham

Preston Falls by David Gates

Birds of America by Lorrie Moore

No Lease on Life by Lynne Tillman

WINNER

FINALISTS:

Midnight Champagne by A. Manette Ansay

The Night Inspector by Frederick Busch

Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee

The Wonders of the Invisible World: stories by David Gates

General Nonfiction 1990-1999

WINNER

The Content of Our Character: a new vision of race in America by Shelby Steel

FINALISTS:

City of Quartz: excavating the future of Los Angeles by Mike Davis

Samba by Alma Guillermoprieto

Disappearing Through the Skylight: culture and technology in the 20th century by O. B. Hardison

The Politics of Rich and Poor: wealth and the American electorate in the Reagan Aftermath by Kevin Phillips

WINNER

Backlash: the undeclared war against American women by Susan Faludi

FINALISTS:

Which Side Are You On?: trying to be for labor when it's flat on its back by Thomas Geoghegan

Praying for Sheetrock by Melissa Fay Green

Savage Inequalities: children in America's schools by Jonathan Kozol