Annal:2002 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Critics Circle Award in the year 2002. 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.
- 2002 NBCC–Criticism winner
- Score: 10.52
In these fourteen witty and elegant essays, William Gass (“the finest prose stylist in America”—Steven Moore, Washington Post) writes about writing, reading, culture, history, politics, and public opinion.
In the first of three parts, Gass addresses literary matters and writers, and contemplates, among other things: the nature of narrative and its philosophical implications; experimental fiction and its importance; literary “lists” (including the currently controversial canon of western literature) and their use. In part two, Gass looks at social and political…
Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color
- 2002 NBCC–Criticism finalist
- Score: 6.52
A fascinating study of the evolution of color in art and science from antiquity to the present.
For art in the twentieth century, medium is the message. Many artists offer works defined by their materials. In no aspect is this more strikingly demonstrated than in the use of color.
Bright Earth is the story of how color evolved and was produced for artistic and commercial use. The modern chemical industry was spawned and nurtured largely by the demand for color as many of today’s major chemical companies began as manufacturers of aniline dye; advances…
- 2002 NBCC–Criticism finalist
- Score: 6.52
In 1792, when he was forty-seven, the Spanish painter Francisco de Goya contracted a serious illness that left him stone deaf. In this extraordinary book, Julia Blackburn follows Goya through the remaining thirty-five years of his life. It was a time of political turmoil, of war, violence, and confusion, and Goya transformed what he saw around him into visionary paintings, drawings, and etchings. These were also years of tenderness for Goya, of intimate relationships with the Duchess of Alba and with Leocadia, his mistress, who accompanied him to the…
- 2002 NBCC–Criticism finalist
- Score: 6.52
This book collects fifty of Christopher Ricks’ reviews from newspapers and journals on both sides of the Atlantic—TLS, London Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, and others—to several of which he has been a regular contributor. The book’s five sections range around the twentieth century, addressing major figures in biography (Ackroyd, Edel, Ellmann, Mailer), poetry and fiction (Heaney, Hemingway, Milosz, Naipaul, Pound), literary criticism and theory (Davie, Empson, Fiedler, Fish, Leavis, Sartre), sociology and cultural studies…
Piano Notes: The World of the Pianist
- 2002 NBCC–Criticism finalist
- Score: 6.52
Charles Rosen is one of the world’s most talented pianists—and one of music’s most astute commentators. Known as a performer of Bach, Beethoven, Stravinsky, and Elliott Carter, he has also written highly acclaimed criticism for sophisticated students and professionals.
In Piano Notes, he writes for a broader audience about an old friend—the piano itself. Drawing upon a lifetime of wisdom and the accumulated lore of many great performers of the past, Rosen shows why the instrument demands such a stark combination of mental and physical prowess. Readers…
