Annal:1999 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Critics Circle Award in the year 1999. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography
- Nonfiction books
- Nonfiction authors
- Biography books
- Biography authors.
The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White
- 1999 NBCC–Biography winner
- Score: 10.49
The Hairstons are extraordinary families, both black and white, who share a complex and compelling history that embodies the legacy of slavery and shows how that legacy has passed into our own time.
Opening at the remote North Carolina plantation of Cooleemee, The Hairstons reads like a gothic tale filled with vexing mysteries. In an attempt to resolve those mysteries, Henry Wiencek crisscrossed the old plantation country in Virginia, North Carolina, and Mississippi, seeking out Hairston descendants and immersing himself in the musty archives of…
Coleridge: Volume 2. Darker Reflections
- 1999 NBCC–Biography finalist
- Score: 6.49
Coleridge: Darker Reflections, the long-awaited second volume, chronicles the last thirty years of his career (1804-1834), a period of domestic and professional turmoil. His marriage foundered, his opium addiction increased, he quarreled bitterly with Wordsworth, and his son, Hartley (a gifted poet himself), became an alcoholic. But after a desperate time of transition, Coleridge reemerged as a new kind of philosophical and meditative author, a great and daring poet, and a lecturer of genius.
Holmes traces the development of Coleridge into a legend…
- 1999 NBCC–Biography finalist
- Score: 6.49
History has remembered J. Pierpont Morgan as a complex and contradictory figure, part robber baron and part patron saint. Now this magisterial biography, based extensively on new material, draws a definitive, full-scale portrait of Morgan’s tumultuous life both in and out of the public eye.Morgan earned his reputation as “the Napoleon of Wall Street” by reorganizing the nation’s railroads and creating some of its greatest industrial trusts, including General Electric and U.S. Steel. At a time when the United States had no Federal Reserve System, he appointed…
Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette
- 1999 LATimes–Biography winner
- 1999 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
- 1999 NBCC–Biography finalist
- Score: 22.49
A scandalously talented stage performer, a practiced seductress of both men and women, and the flamboyant author of some of the greatest works of twentieth-century literature, Colette was our first true superstar. Now, in Judith Thurman’s Secrets of the Flesh, Colette at last has a biography worthy of her dazzling reputation.
Having spent her childhood in the shadow of an overpowering mother, Colette escaped at age twenty into a turbulent marriage with the sexy, unscrupulous Willy—a literary charlatan who took credit for her bestselling Claudine novels. Weary…
The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind the New York Times
- 1999 NBCC–Biography finalist
- Score: 6.49
With full cooperation from the families and unconditional access to the Times archives, Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones have written the first insiders biography of the most powerful media clan in America.
When Adolph Ochs, the son of poor Jewish immigrants, bought the bankrupt New York Times in 1896, he transformed it into America’s most respected and powerful newspaper. His family’s values and prejudices set the agenda for the paper and came to set the agenda for the nation. The Trust is a dramatic saga set against a backdrop of world…
