Dust off your formal wear and break out the bubbly because the National Book Awards (a.k.a. the Oscars of the book world) are nearly upon us. Yes, in just a few short hours, five dumbstruck authors will be fêted, garlanded, and welcomed into the American literary pantheon.
For those of you who’ve never heard of the National Book Awards, allow allow us to elucidate: every Fall the National Book Foundation nominates twenty-five books across five categories (Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Translated Literature, and Young People’s Literature) with the winners being announced at a glitzy November ceremony in New York City.
Now in their 71st year, the awards are considered by many to be the country’s most prestigious literary honor, and have, in times gone by, been won by such titans as Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Saul Bellow, Flannery O’Connor, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Annie Proulx, Susan Sontag, and Colson Whitehead, to name but a few.
As we await the announcement of this year’s winners, here’s a list of the twenty previous nonfiction honorees of this still-young century (you can check out the fiction list here).
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2019
The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom
(Grove Press)
“…[an] extraordinary, engrossing debut … Broom…pushes past the baseline expectations of memoir as a genre to create an entertaining and inventive amalgamation of literary forms. Part oral history, part urban history, part celebration of a bygone way of life, The Yellow House is a full indictment of the greed, discrimination, indifference and poor city planning that led her family’s home to be wiped off the map. It is an instantly essential text, examining the past, present and possible future of the city of New Orleans, and of America writ large … Broom is our guide, but not the sort who holds readers’ hands, uninterested as she is in tidy transitions between one type of writing and another. The through line is her thought process, her frequent questioning … The interviews also yield unforgettable scenes … The true test of her worthiness is her empathy and focused attention. She is a responsible historian, granting her subjects the grace of multiple examinations over the years … Broom’s deadpan humor comes through clearest in her descriptions of herself … The Yellow House is a book that triumphs much as a jazz parade does: by coming loose when necessary, its parts sashaying independently down the street, but righting itself just in the nick of time, and teaching you a new way of enjoying it in the process.”
–Angela Flournoy, The New York Times Book Review
2018
The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke by Jeffrey C. Stewart
(Oxford University Press)
“…a vitally important, astonishingly well researched, exhaustive biography of the brilliant, complex, flawed, utterly fascinating man who, if he did not start the movement, served as its curator, intellectual champion, and guiding spirit … His account of Locke’s life is detailed, sometimes astoundingly so, but never descends into tedium. More important, he displays a thorough grasp of the intellectual challenges Locke took on … On his death, in 1954, Locke left behind achievements that deserve to be more widely celebrated, and this biography represents a serious, worthy attempt to get the party started.”
–Clifford Thompson, The Wall Street Journal
2017
The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia by Masha Gessen
(Riverhead)
“…a magisterial, panoramic overview of Russia under Putin … While the people she singles out are often vociferous opponents of the rearward direction of the New Russia, she gives at least equal time to the group the perestroika historian Yuri Afanasyev dubbed ‘the aggressively obedient majority’ and to the tens of millions of ordinary Russians who would be happy to go back to the USSR, more or less … The characters’ personal histories add life and nuance to Gessen’s narrative. But it takes a while to get a handle on all of the players, who are as numerous as the cast of a Tolstoy novel, if less romantically clad. But portraying the politics of totalitarianism does not call for a romantic filter. Gessen’s reconstruction of the ongoing saga of Russia’s reversion to vozhdizm makes for thrilling and necessary reading for those who seek to understand the path to suppression of individual freedoms, and who recognize that this path can be imposed on any nation that lacks the vigilance to avert it.”
–Liesl Schillinger, The Barnes and Noble Review
2016
Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi
(Bold Type Books)
“… a lucid, accessible survey of how ‘the people’ were racialised over 500 years … Kendi confidently re-evaluates the writings of many celebrated abolitionists and African-American heroes and concludes that racism often underpinned their strategies … Kendi’s most important insight might help rethink anti-racist activism … One might expect Kendi to be despondent, but he believes that eradicating discriminatory policies will consign racist ideas to the past … an un-yielding narrative of racist ideas, violence and harm. However, the book is also a history of refusals.”
–Sadiah Quereshi, The New Statesman
2015
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
(Spiegel & Grau)
“The book is polemical at times, but it’s also driven by probing reporting and a loving intimacy. For example, Coates writes with tremendous power, but also intense grief, about a dashing African-American college friend who was shot by a police officer under highly suspicious circumstances outside Washington, D.C., more than a decade ago … demonstrates this author’s admirable ability to interrogate himself and challenge his own attitudes and ideas, while picking apart those generally held by the society he lives in. Coates’ book possesses a brooding eloquence that only carefully channeled anger and sadness can produce … stands to become a classic on the subject of race in America.”
–Tyrone Beason, The Seattle Times
2014
Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, & Faith in the New China by Evan Osnos
(FSG)
“Age of Ambition is…a riveting and troubling portrait of a people in a state of extreme anxiety about their identity, values and future … eclectic portraits are drawn from across the political spectrum … Some of these characters appear several times, giving the book a cumulative impact that helps persuade the reader that China has lost its way. The remarkable story of Lin Yifu, the Taiwanese defector who swam across the strait to become the World Bank’s chief economist and later a cheerleader for China’s economic prosperity, provides a strong narrative thread. So, too, does the story of the persecuted artist Ai Weiwei … Mr. Osnos has a keen grasp of how the Internet has transformed China’s political landscape, circumventing the government’s efforts to manage information about public incidents.”
–Judith Shapiro (The New York Times)
2013
The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer
(FSG)
“… ambitious … a fascinating hybrid … Packer, an economical and often elegant writer, interweaves these stories, told in short takes, with reporting on distinctive American locales … a richly complex narrative brew … Don’t read The Unwinding expecting either grand epiphanies or nuts-and-bolts solutions to America’s problems—only graceful writing and modest faith that a few dreamers and strivers among us may lead the way to a better future.”
–Julia M. Klein (The Chicago Tribune)
2012
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo
(Random House)
“…the butterfly effect of the harrowingly interrelated global economy described in Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Katherine Boo’s first book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers…narrative nonfiction work catalogs a period of three years, beginning before the global market crash of 2008, of the Husain family, supported by a teenage trash-buyer named Abdul, and others who scrape together a living in a slum called Annawadi…depicts a modern India in the throes of embracing the Western-spun dream of unchecked capitalism and the upward mobility that supposedly comes with it… The great irony exposed within the book’s finely wrought pages, however, is the lie of equality in the new age of global markets, particularly when it comes to the extremely poor …a richly detailed tapestry of tragedy and triumph told by a seemingly omniscient narrator with an attention to detail that reads like fiction while in possession of the urgent humanity of nonfiction.”
–Jessica Gelt, Los Angeles Times
2011
The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt
(W.W. Norton)
“The Swerve is one of those brilliant works of non-fiction that’s so jam-packed with ideas and stories it literally boggles the mind. But throughout this profusion of riches, it seems to me, a moral emerges: something about the fragility of cultural inheritance and how it needs to be consciously safeguarded. Greenblatt, of course, doesn’t preach, but, instead, as a master storyteller, he transports his readers deep into the ancient and late medieval past; he makes us shiver at his recreation of that crucial moment in a German monastery when modern civilization, as we’ve come to know it, depended on a swerve of the Poggio’s grasping fingers.”
–Maureen Corrigan, NPR
2010
Just Kids by Patti Smith
(Ecco Press)
“At one level, the book’s interest is a given … The surprise is that it’s never cryptic or scattershot … Just Kids is the most spellbinding and diverting portrait of funky-but-chic New York in the late ’60s and early ’70s that any alumnus has committed to print. The tone is at once flinty and hilarious, which figures: [Smith’s] always been both tough and funny, two real saving graces in an artist this prone to excess. What’s sure to make her account a cornucopia for cultural historians, however, is that the atmosphere, personalities and mores of the time are so astutely observed. No nostalgist about her formative years, Smith makes us feel the pinched prospects that led her to ditch New Jersey for a vagabond life in Manhattan … Most often, you’re simply struck by her intelligence, whether she’s figuring out why an acting career doesn’t interest her… or sizing up the ultra-New York interplay between the city’s fringe art scenes and the high-society sponsorship to which Mapplethorpe was drawn … This enchanting book is a reminder that not all youthful vainglory is silly; sometimes it’s preparation.”
–Tom Carson, The New York Times Book Review
2009
The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by T.J. Stiles
(Knopf)
“Stiles demonstrates a brute eloquence of his own. This is a mighty—and mighty confident—work, one that moves with force and conviction and imperious wit through Vanderbilt’s noisy life and time … full of sharp, unexpected turns … The most flat-out enjoyable sections are those that deal with New York’s great steamship wars of the first half of the 19th century … Mr. Stiles is clear-eyed about his subject’s nearly amoral rapacity … Mr. Stiles gets Vanderbilt the man onto paper. He is eloquent on Vanderbilt’s love of horses and horse racing, his tangled relationships with his 13 children and his dabbling in the occult … There are moments in any biography of this size when your eyes are going to glaze over; I certainly did not wish The First Tycoon were longer. But I read eagerly and avidly. This is state-of-the-art biography, crisper and more piquant than a 600-page book has any right to be.”
–Dwight Garner, The New York Times
2008
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed
(W. W. Norton)
“The Hemingses of Monticello is a brilliant book. It marks the author as one of the most astute, insightful, and forthright historians of this generation. Not least of Annette Gordon-Reed’s achievements is her ability to bring fresh perspectives to the life of a man whose personality and character have been scrutinized, explained, and justified by a host of historians and biographers … While praising her grasp of the sources, her legal acuity, her erudition, and the stylishness of her narrative, it remains to be said that her great achievement lies in telling this story. Because it is one of the stories that really matter.”
–Edmund S. Morgan and Marie Morgan, The New York Review of Books
2007
Legacy of Ashes: The HIstory of the CIA by Tim Weiner
(Doubleday)
“Weiner deftly and succinctly shows how the agency has navigated the first sixty years of its existence … Among the more shocking revelations of the book are the many urban legends that are, in fact, true … Weiner masterfully exposes the incompetence of the agency and the men who’ve led it. Using a relentless narrative style that dispenses with lengthy biographies of even the most important individuals, he pushes through a staggering amount of raw information in relatively short order. His prose is sharp, and never condescends to the reader … For all its weight, the book has surprising moments of humor … One can’t help but share Weiner’s frustration about the CIA’s past, as well as his fear for what its failures mean for America’s future. Legacy of Ashes is the rare book that should be read by every American, especially in an election year. Luckily, it’s also a thoroughly enjoyable book, one that’s hardly a chore to read.”
–Patrick Brown, The Millions
2006
The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan
(Houghton Mifflin)
“Illuminating these hidden lives serves to strengthen the larger story of the Dust Bowl. Egan nimbly moves his lens between macro and micro, balancing hard data and national conditions with portraits of people you come to care about … Occasionally Egan’s writing edges toward the theatrical, but more often than not his style swells to fit the magnitude of monster storms and scales down to the individual families trapped in mind-numbing poverty … Egan has gone beyond statistics to reach the heart of this tragedy. The Worst Hard Time provides a sobering, gripping account of a disaster whose wounds are still not fully healed today.”
–Carol Iaciofano, The Boston Globe
2005
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
(Vintage Books)
“A writer all her life (Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Democracy, A Book of Common Prayer among others), few are more expert than Didion at cleanly parsing thoughts and feelings … What she has produced, with remarkable clarity, is a record of her thoughts and feelings during her first year of bereavement … If Didion’s narrative sounds heartrending, it is—utterly so. But at the same time, it is a work of much majesty … But The Year of Magical Thinking is also something more…it is particularly touching to read about a decades-long partnership that thrived … We her readers are left simply to admire both her bravery and her skill, and to offer whatever intelligent compassion we can from afar.”
–Marjorie Kehe, The Christian Science Monitor
2004
Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Right, and Murder in the Jazz Age by Kevin Boyle
(Henry Holt)
“Kevin Boyle’s Arc of Justice is by far the most cogent and thorough account yet of the trial and its aftermath … One of its virtues is the way Boyle vividly recreates the energy and menace of Detroit in 1925 … Boyle deftly shows how the trial took on different meanings for its various players … Those working-class whites are the only people who remain more or less faceless in Boyle’s narrative. He does explain how their fear of black interlopers was rooted in the city’s precarious economics: mortgages were so hard to finance that a drop in property values could mean eviction for many families.”
–Robert F. Worth, The New York Times Book Review
2003
Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy by Carlos Eire
(Free Press)
“… succeeds … [Eire] has done a splendid job. The memoir is masterfully written, bursting with wonderful details and images and populated by characters so well described that they seem to be sitting next to you on the couch … Eire has a leisurely, conversational way of telling his story … The book has its flaws, but once you’ve fallen under the spell of the author’s charming, sympathetic, sorrowful voice, they all seem minor … without that love, both for his family and for the country he left behind, it seems unlikely that Eire could have written such an extraordinary book.”
–Curtis Sittenfeld, The Washington Post
2002
The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate by Robert A. Caro
(Knopf)
“…it is Caro’s great achievement that in more than 1,000 pages contained in this volume he has massively extended his work on Lyndon Johnson without in any way diluting its quality … To me this book stands out because it brings that pace and drama to life: it makes it almost as exciting to read the book as it would have been to be there … Caro’s achievement…is not only vividly to tell the story of one remarkable man. It is also to explain with clarity the lives of the people he worked with, the history of the institutions in which he exercised his power, and the deep social forces which moved those people and institutions to action. When a fourth volume finally completes the set, this will be nothing short of a magnificent history of 20th-century America.”
–William Hague, The Telegraph
2001
The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression by Andrew Solomon
(Scribner)
“… exhaustively researched, provocative and often deeply moving … Readers should not be discouraged by the opening chapter, titled Depression, which is the least coherent chapter in the book, lurching from point to point as if awaiting a principle of inspired organization that never arrives … Even when writing more or less straightforward journalism, Solomon writes engagingly; his style is intimate and anecdotal, and often bemused … Amid so much information, the author might have been more discriminating and skeptical … a considerable accomplishment. It is likely to provoke discussion and controversy, and its generous assortment of voices, from the pathological to the philosophical, makes for rich, variegated reading. Solomon leaves us with the enigmatic statement that ‘depression seems to be a peculiar assortment of conditions for which there are no evident boundaries’—exactly like life.”
–Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Times
2000
In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick
(Penguin)
“…a mix of holy seawater, hot blood and searching analysis. Philbrick has elevated the adventure of the Essex to a rich and disturbing study of the secret root-tangles of how and why things happened as they did, holding up what we know now of human and animal behavior against the 1820 circumstances and actions … The approach is unusual and fresh, the book intelligent, probing, scholarly, gripping and satisfying. It sets a new mark for maritime literature, away from the traditional adventure pattern. And for all his erudite knowledge applied to the complexities of human behaviours, Philbrick does not neglect to note the random twists of fate that make or ruin a life … Much of the literary excellence of In the Heart lies in its fine and introspective passages … The Nantucket of 1820 in Philbrick’s pages comes across as a strange and somewhat sinister place, characterised by familiarity with death, clannishness, class divisions, stored anger, sharp business practices, and oppression.”
–Annie Proulx, The Irish Times
