Annal:2000 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Critics Circle Award in the year 2000. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
- Nonfiction books
- Nonfiction authors
- Criticism books
- Criticism authors.
- 2000 NBCC–Criticism winner
- Score: 10.5
In her new collection of essays, Cynthia Ozick, everywhere acclaimed as a critic, novelist, and storyteller, examines some of the world’s most illustrious writers and their work, tackles compelling contemporary literary and moral issues, and looks into the wellsprings of her own lifelong engagement with literature.
She writes—quarrelsomely—about Crime and Punishment, about William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice, about the Book of Job. She inquires into the subterranean dispositions and quandaries of Kafka and Henry James. She discusses the difficulties…
From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present
- 2000 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
- 2000 NBCC–Criticism finalist
- Score: 12.5
Highly regarded here and abroad for some thirty works of cultural history and criticism, master historian Jacques Barzun has now set down in one continuous narrative the sum of his discoveries and conclusions about the whole of Western culture since 1500.
In this account, Barzun describes what Western Man wrought from the Renaisance and Reformation down to the present in the double light of its own time and our pressing concerns. He introduces characters and incidents with his unusual literary style and grace, bringing to the fore those that have “Puritans as…
Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World
- 2000 NBCC–Criticism finalist
- Score: 6.5
A series of extraordinary explorations of the biographies and literary achievements of twelve modern women writers, Passionate Minds tells the stories of women who “rewrote” the world that they inherited, shaping beliefs about vital issues ranging from religion to sex to race to politics.
Claudia Roth Pierpont organizes these probing portraits into three sections. Broadly speaking, the first deals with issues of sexual freedom, in essays on Olive Schreiner, Gertrude Stein, Anaïs Nin, and—surprisingly, for those who do not know her as a writer—Mae West.…
Critical Entertainments: Music Old and New
- 2000 NBCC–Criticism finalist
- Score: 6.5
An extraordinarily gifted musician and writer, Charles Rosen is a peerless commentator on the history and performance of music. Critical Entertainments brings together many of the essays that have established him as one of the most influential and eloquent voices in the field of music in our time. These essays cover a broad range of musical forms, historical periods, and issues-from Bach through Brahms to Carter and Schoenberg, from contrapuntal keyboard music to opera, from performance practices to music history as a discipline. They revisit Rosen’s favorite…
- 2000 NBCC–Criticism finalist
- Score: 6.5
In his long-awaited first book of prose, poet and essayist Sherod Santos takes a compelling look into some of poetry’s deepest secrets, an investigation that leads him to the surprising conclusion that poems have minds of their own, minds often inaccessible even to the one who composed them.
In these essays, Santos explores not only what he thinks about poetry but also what and how poetry thinks about itself. His writings range across the history of Western poetry, from formative classical myths to modern experimental forms, and touch on subjects as diverse as…
